The Herald - The Herald Magazine
The beauty of everyday detritus
Tim Taylor turns rubbish into art works
TIM Taylor is obsessed, he tells me, with the stuff around us. From recycling to household appliances, his art, often witty, encompasses everything from a household iron melting through a block of ice (roughly 30 minutes, in case you’re wondering) to a circle of non-circular saws and the “abstract origami” of used bus tickets.
He has recorded the dropping of his daily tea bag from an 8 foot height to the floor below, and car indicators flashing in and out of time.
His stuff is the beauty and pathos of the everyday. His latest work, currently being installed in the Custom Lane gallery space in Leith, takes the recycling we throw out – specifically packaging – deconstructs it, and makes prints from it. “I’ve been flattening this stuff for years!” he grins.
Taylor has been collecting packaging – much to his wife’s chagrin, he tells me – for the past 8 years. “It was a joy getting them all out. There is just so much interesting stuff on these boxes – the textures, the lines, the folds and so on.”
He is interested in the marks, not of the corporate brands, but of the glue that binds the unbound pieces, the folds that define the final form. Once, particularly, tactile nobbles of Braille. Each carton makes its own mark.
And not all are created equal, which Taylor only discovers when he takes each one apart to its flat-pack form. The black and white prints bring every form into relation with another, the structures printed in the middle of the paper, mounted on the walls, all 108 of them (although he has a few more in reserve) as a grid.
Black, gritty, the shapes are frequently unrecognisable, demanding to be decoded, a blocky sci-fi Rorscach army released from the recycling box under the sink.
“There’s a typology when you group them together. When I started photographing them, keeping a record, I got quite excited about seeing them all together,” says Taylor.
“He was reminded, he says, of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s Water Tower photos, their Gas Tanks, their Blast Furnaces, each series taking an architectural type and photographing it in black and white, the form central, “a more or less perfect chain of different forms and shapes,” as they once said. Taylor’s own series Sacred Vessels (2018), which may be shown again as part of ArchiFringe in 2021, was a matchstick model homage.
Taylor’s other day job is at GrovesRaines Architects, housed in an annexe of the 16th century Lamb House just over the river from Custom Lane – no flat-pack houses here. But Taylor has been working as an artist since graduating from the Architecture School of Edinburgh College of Art, ensconced in his WASPS studio, occasionally moonlighting in the arts venue Summerhall when he needs somewhere more local.
His work, too, has included a number of public commissions in health centre settings, not least at Maryhill where he created a series of wonderful miniature
worlds to be seen through a peephole in a wall or clear tile in the floor. Last year, one of his earliest and most popular film works, Domestic Erosion (a witty and pointed triptych of household appliances melting an ice block) was shown as part of an experimental music festival in Berlin, slowly melting on the walls as an Australian jazz band played a four hour non-stop set.
Taylor has gone back to age old Japanese printmaking practice for these works, flattening out the box, rolling the ink over it, lining it up, laying paper on top and then rubbing over it with a bamboo baren – essentially a nub of wood that you burnish prints with. “I did all these on a bench, they’re all hand printed which kind of opens up a bit of the manual process, and introduces a bit of chance...”
He has his favourites, notably a hummus carton, “with holes so the pot goes in,” he says. “The simple ones folded in one direction. They’re very minimalist!” he says. The unfolded, printed shapes encompass all sorts, he grins. “The ones I’ve gravitated to personally are less flappy! More blocky!”
The darkness of it all will be lightened by a series of colourful felt tip pen sculptures, the lids stacked vertically. All are leftover from dried up felt tips given to his children over the years. More stuff. At heart this is an observation, says Taylor, on how much of this stuff passes through our lives.
Tim Taylor: Dark Interiors, Custom Lane, 1 Customs Wharf, Leith, 0131 510 7571 customlane.co Until 2 Feb, Mon – Fri, 9am – 5pm; Sat, 10am – 5pm; Sun 11am – 4pm