Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor, printed textile artist and designer works from her studio in Glasgow. Her practice embraces a wide range of printed fabrics, from architectural commissions — public and domestic — to one-off works for galleries. She creates visual rhythms that evoke a sense of recognition, she seeks to capture a moment, atmosphere or environment. www.joannakinnerslytaylor.com/
There is a significant textural quality to her work which has an emotional resonance to it which I wished to emulate. To have a lightness of touch with the exposure, printing, stencilling processes, and reactive dyes as to render an emotional quality to my printed textiles to communicate both beauty and fragility within the natural forms. From working on hand-dyed fabric Kinnersly-Taylor emphasised that she works with both negative and positive space to create fine art printed textiles. The use of shapes as repeat imagery with textural mark-making and a considered colour palette produced contemporary ways of illustrating what she sees and experiences. Like Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor when working on mark making, I used a reduced colour palette to focus upon the textural elements within the print and my narrative. I wanted to create subtle interplays of colour and texture through the layering while also considering the positive and negative spaces. The linear artwork in repeat offered contrasts in the overall print.
Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor House– Dyed, painted, and screen-printed vintage handkerchief linen; 139cm x 136cm House explores a domestic space – the interior of our Glasgow tenement flat. The scale plan of room shapes juxtaposed with a shadow motif of light filtering through a window blind, and a tiny repeating pattern inspired by insides of envelopes. Through repetition and layering, these elements form an ever-shifting backdrop to daily life, building a sense of space lived in, remembered and altered. Vintage handkerchief linen reflects the domestic nature of an intimate interior. https://www.craftscouncil.org.uk/directory/maker/joanna-kinnersly-taylor
Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor acknowledged the use of natural fabrics including linen and wool within her screen-printing processes to illustrate how she sees and experiences the world immediately around her (2019). I used heavy upholstery linen within this large-scale series to capture the print and nuances of the mark making as every textural element was shown given the robustness and resilience of the material. Within the personal response to natural forms in crisis series of prints I was influenced by Joanna and her work on linen as well as my previous experience of linen in print.
I was struck by this textile artists relationship with her work, of the ideologies, ethics and philosophies which underlie what she does throughout her creative practice, of the depth of her experiencing which is conveyed through her printed textiles, of communicating a deeply felt and emotional response to lived events. I sought to use what was personal to me, which encapsulated who I was and what I cared about in a way that Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor has managed to develop and integrate meaning into print, to see a story running through the materials. I was influenced by this idea of experiencing being a series of patterns in repeat as in Resonance by Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor.
Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor’s mainly abstract work, examines ideas of boundaries, junctions and intersections, where one thing may start, end, or overlap another, symbolising the internal mapping of thoughts, as well as external paths taken. This transience and progression interacts with areas of repeating pattern – including most recently her own script – and these motifs serve as the ‘backdrop’ of daily life, repeating over and over, ever shifting, to create a surface that resonates and pulses. www.62group.org.uk/artist/joanna-kinnersly-taylor/
I related to and with this idea of boundaries, junctions, and intersections which I use in my own creative practice, of overlaid imagery in print with textural qualities interjecting line. I like this sense of journeys taken with every new creative process, of mapping out new routes and pathways to the communication of ideas to narratives, to stories told in print. Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor has been a significant influence on me and my textile work, of being able to develop an altogether deeper and more meaningful relationship with materials through my creative process and practice.
