May Day May Day May Day, at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, was Emilie’s third major solo show comprising entirely new work made during Lockdown and the Covid pandemic. As with her Edgelands exhibition which toured from Oldham to Stoke on Trent, Birkenhead and Farnham in 2017-18, and 2019’s Beating the Bounds in London, the new body of work continued a narrative focus on the lives of women and girls, but wove around the storytelling open ended streamers for interpretation and conjecture.
The centrepiece was a sequence of tall paired cylindrical vessels, intricately decorated with animated scenes. The ground was soft washes of pastel colours or stencilled floral patterns in cream or umber tones. Over these animated scenes populated with women and girls in liminal landscapes somewhere at the edge of town, or in domestic flock wallpapered interiors. Women dancing around Maypoles, single mothers, hallowed with gold leaf, holding or corralling infants. Groups of girls, on the cusp of womanhood, in animated movement with flailing arms and acrobatic postures. Waving or drowning?
Myth and ritual intertwine with the everyday in much of Taylor’s storytelling. Here the characters are recast as Horae; originally the ancient greek personifications of the seasons, but later coming to embody the female forces of natural order and social justice – elemental binders of family and community, tasked with protecting ritual, traditional customs and social order. Emilie speaks of “everyday Madonnas” and we think of the challenges of home schooling, remote working, of the child rearing and caring in a time of pandemic. There is a laundry basket on one of these vases. Some of her interiors are claustrophobic, some of the landscapes are bleak. Bunting billows threadbare in one backdrop. These are remembered stories and lived lives, brought vividly before us.
Read the essay by Shane Enright
