Phantom Yarns reflect how we experience time

You know a new season has arrived when new exhibitions start to appear, as they tend to do every September. It may not feel exactly like a new season with the still high temperatures yet come September the cultural world sees a change. The lively music festivals and beach parties begin to fall into their hibernation and new theatre productions and art exhibitions are in the works.

This month, Art Seen Gallery in Nicosia is hosting its first solo exhibition by British/Greek-Cypriot artist Diana Taylor, opening on September 15. Her Phantom Yarns exhibition gives a glimpse into her multidisciplinary practice using analogue and digital technologies with painting and fabrics, curated by Maria Stathi, the founder and director of the gallery.

Commenting on Diana’s work, independent curator and cultural producer Isabel de Vasconcellos writes: “Phantom Yarns develops Taylor’s longstanding interest in how we experience and make sense of time in an era of information overload, where abundance and infinite access compete with the urge for order and elucidation. With all material culture at our fingertips, we are more tightly than ever enmeshed in a visual continuum that cuts through the veils of space and temporality. This availability has the effect of intermittently flattening and deepening perspective, leaving us afloat in a world of images, with all its attendant fallout of wonder and disorientation.

“Taylor’s practice, encompassing painting, screen-printing, needlework and 3D printing, imbues the analogue pleasures of touch, layering, tearing and weaving, with the fugitive qualities of the digital realm of abstraction, manipulation and ceaseless mutation. The works in Phantom Yarns explore ideas of what the contemporary is at any one moment, by sampling and appropriating the materials of their time. Taylor uses textiles, Photoshopped images and wire mesh readings variously screen-printed, collaged, painted, woven and embroidered onto large scale fabric assemblages and canvases.”

Currently, the artist is a practice-based PhD researcher at Sheffield Hallam University, working in collaboration with the William Morris Gallery, London and she will travel to Cyprus for her exhibition. On Wednesday 15 and Thursday 16 at 7pm, she will give guided tours of her exhibited work at the gallery.

“There is an irony in deliberately imbuing decorative textiles,” says de Vasconcellos about the artist’s work, “conceived to render the experience of the domestic beautiful and welcoming – with so much failure. Diana Taylor’s works scratch the veneer of everyday life to uncover intimations of darker truths.”

Phantom Yarns

Solo exhibition by Diana Taylor. September 15 – October 22. Guided tours on September 15 and 16 at 7pm. Art Seen Gallery, Nicosia. Opening night:6pm-9pm. Monday, Wednesday, Friday: 4pm-7.30pm or any other day by appointment. Tel: 22-006624