John Hurrell – 10 April, 2021

Kāryn Taylor‘s unusual wall sculptures are made of translucent acrylic, showcasing delicate pale colour and intense computer-etched glowing lines that often are arranged in perspectival formations, but not always. These impeccably made, seductive, geometric abstractions are sometimes frontal. They are quite mysterious because no electricity is involved, and the sense of powered illumination is striking. You suspect a hidden cord is plugged into the wall.

In Taylor‘s production method, cast acrylic trays are used that have rounded corners, glued on sheets over the front, and carefully positioned bent strips that suck in the light from their planar sides and ends. They condense it so that (via their narrow edges) it is emitted out the front ‘picture plane’—that is parallel to the wall—in brightly intensified linear form.

Taylor can control the thickness of the frontal sheets so that some lines are more focussed than others (by being closer to the viewer), with sharper edges. If the strip is exactly the same hue as the front sheet, its sides tend to dissolve in invisibility. Some other intensely coloured lines hover in a surrounding diffuse haze. Taylor also controls the background tone and its effects on the glowing strip edges in front.

Besides the static translucent acrylic works of milky colour, this gifted light artist also works with projected moving lines on the wall (like say Anthony McCall) that with Taylor connect with leaning planes (a nod to John McCracken) and become paired with painted Bochneresque architectural elements on the floor. These works appeal greatly through their kinetic subtlety—the slow movement of the line or wobbly geometric shape. The moving angular elements seem at first to be painted directly on the wall.

Taylor is fascinated by quantum physics and the writings of David Bohm. She sees geometry as a means of setting out formal structures that hint at underpinning energy patterns that support fundamental processes within the material world and its rudimentary dynamism. Her carefully planned allusive projects are wonderfully engrossing as optically-loaded, slyly deceptive, sensual objects.

John Hurrell

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