Jackie Taylor
Dandridge, TN | Exhibiting Since 1994
Where does my work come from? My mother was a student of fashion design in 1940’s NYC; my father was a jazz trumpeter playing the big band circuit.
During my early childhood in south Florida, my friends and I would gather fruit and sell it door to door…my introduction to capitalism. The Manhattan Project brought my family to Tennessee, and my next job at age 10 was supplying a film production company with live butterflies. This entailed catching and feeding various species of butterflies, and learning how to keep them alive in captivity with no wing damage. School seemed like a prison sentence. My real life was in the woods, building forts, swinging from grape vines, studying ants, collecting butterflies, and reading.
At age 18, with my father weak from work related illness, I set off alone on a train to Memphis for my first year of college. Within a few short years both of my parents had died. The tilt and velocity of the planet had shifted, and the glittering fragments and smoldering ruins of what remained became a palette of materials to draw from.
Inspiration is the Breathing in of Light. My work is informed by amulets and talismans, old navigation tools, ancient astronomy charts and the glorious night sky itself. Like Buddhist monks of old, I write prayers of intention and add them to the crucible of molten metal at that moment of alchemical possibility. The resulting designs are all parts of a map, to chart the trail so far, and to illuminate the path ahead.