SARAH MAY TAYLOR

Self-Care Double Portrait 1, with Nicole Angela, Toronto, 2020

Her Passing, and an Aesthetic of Collective Belonging explores the artist’s identity in respect to racial passing and identity performance as a political act. The double portrait helps to convey an interest in highlighting the importance of the artist as an individual location of social, political and historical investigation within anti-oppressive, intersectional thematics. Making connections to personal history, memory and the mother archetype becomes a way to make whole and reconnect to creative acts of ritual and intuition.

Nicole Angela and I occur in an intimate pose that is carefully arranged and intentionally ambiguous. We represent a connection, although it is unclear our relationship or responsibility to one another; we are together, appearing almost as one sculptural body. Nicole Angela is a healer and birth doula, as well as a friend/sister/mother influence in my life. In this work her presence is a kinship – a representation of the mother archetype and symbol of platonic intimacy within female centered Black and biracial communities. 

Self-Care Double Portrait 2, with Nicole Angela, Toronto 2020

Her Passing, and an Aesthetic of Collective Belonging, investigates the body as a site of memory, trauma, and connection. The double portrait confronts ideas about belonging, identity, empowerment and authenticity by setting new scenes for imagining healing and reflection. I am asking questions about what taking up space means within a mixed race female body, and from an identity that exists within a specific set of stories; about what the societal performance of race/biracialism looks like and how it can come together in an art context, while exploring identity as a political act.

I am interested in ambiguities of female intimacy, and the image’s ability to speak to the space that Black and biracial women share together along a continuum of their shared history, as well as their very different but also common African and European ancestry.

Resistance Series, Women's March, Toronto, 2018-ongoing

Resistance Series, Women's March, Washington 2017-ongoing

Love, Mexico City, 2016

Bryan Espiritu, The Crazy Project Series, Toronto, 2015