Simon Taylor
Biography
(British, b. 1965)
Simon Taylor is an artist, graphic designer, musician, and film director. Happily for Eyestorm, he somehow found time in his busy international schedule to create for us a new series of limited edition screenprints. Taylor’s diverse creative project enables him to avoid the limiting strait-jacket of ‘style’. His facility with a broad range of cutting-edge digital technologies lends his work an uncompromising contemporary flavour. This new series of striking black and white screen prints emerge from the fertile territory between art and design, a zone in which Taylor feels entirely at home. One can imagine these kaleidoscopic images as the output of a mysterious sub-atomic process, a random chaos momentarily stilled and rendered as a vortex of swirling parabolas receding into infinity. Yet they retain a strangely organic quality, like the plumage of some fabulous cybernetic bird.
Born in England in 1965, Taylor studied at Bath Academy of Art and at London College of Printing, graduating with a BA (Hons) in Graphic Art. He began to flex his creative instincts while still at high school, working in a saw mill and later in a carpentry workshop where he learned to make furniture. Soon after, he began messing around with cameras and video equipment. Since the 1980s he has directed films on various aspects of contemporary culture, has made videos and paintings and created installations in Japan and Europe. In 1990, he formed a fashion brand Urban Action, later to become UACT, which he ran for 15 years. More recently, he has designed world-touring stage sets for major rock bands such as INXS and has won awards for his promotional films and record sleeve designs. In 1991, Taylor helped found Tomato studios, a studio collective made up of individuals from diverse creative backgrounds and in 1999, following collaborations on music for films, he formed the music group Johnny Conquest which to date has produced two albums. Today, he continues to design for major corporate brands, directs commercials and films and exhibits his art and design work with Tomato in Europe and Japan. He is currently working on a two-year project in Spain as part of Water Expo, Zaragoza, involving film, sculpture and sound.