Featured Artist Nicola Taylor

Photographer Nicola Taylor tells stories with her images. Enjoy this portfolio and see more of her work here.

 

 

I am a a self portrait photographer from Yorkshire in the UK. I have always been in love with storytelling and I shoot the majority of my “Tales from the Moors Country” images in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park, an ancient landscape of wild, desolate beauty that has inspired stories for thousands of years.

 

 

I believe that we create stories to make sense of our relationship to the world around us and that a sense of place is often a central theme. I’m really interested in the way in which the landscape around a community affects the stories that spring up there and that’s something I try to work with, taking inspiration from local folklore and literature and the way in which they express both a celebration of the landscape and an unease about our fragile presence within it.

 

 

I consider it a gift that I live so close to such an inspiring place and that I’m fortunate enough to be able to spend my time exploring it and highlighting its beauty to people who don’t know it as well.

 

 

My images are all self portraits, taken with a remote control. I often layer images on top of each other to create scenes and situations that don’t exist in the real world, sometimes using up to 100 different pictures to create just one image.

 

 

I began using myself as a model because I found it very difficult to communicate to other models what I was trying to achieve, having come to art very late in life after a seven year career as a stockbroker. I didn’t believe that I was creative in any way and I had never been talented at drawing or painting but, as I approached my thirtieth birthday, I found myself wanting to create and searching for a medium in which I could work.

 

 

I left my career in finance, without any idea of what I would do next and a year of self exploration led me to art school to study photography. But I would find myself sitting in the library for hours studying books of nineteenth and twentieth century storybook illustrations and wishing I could do that. When I connected my photography skills with the imaginative spirit that came from the storybooks I finally found my creative calling.

 

 

I like to think of my images as illustrations to an unwritten storybook. I deliberately make them ambiguous and open to interpretation because I want the viewer to access their own imagination and connect to their own love of stories.