Carol Taylor lives and works in her studio situated in her garden in a beautiful rural location in South Lanarkshire, Scotland. She originally studied Sculpture for five years at Edinburgh College of Art and then took her Masters Degree in Painting for three years at the Royal College of Art in London. She is a former lecturer in sculpture at Edinburgh College of Art who has exhibited widely in Britain, Sweden and America.
Carol has spent the past twenty years in various collaborations with her brother, Dr. Andy Taylor, a mycologist and senior research scientist at the Macaulay Land Use Research Institute in Aberdeen. This collaboration between art and science culminated in two exhibitions during 2003 and 2004, at Linnaeus’ Hammarby, Uppsala, Sweden. During her time as a lecturer at the Edinburgh College of art she received an Arts and Humanities Research Board Award for a research year at the Royal Botanic Garden, in Edinburgh. This research exchange led to a collaboration during 2009, funded by a Knowledge Exchange Grant with the Macaulay Institute, again, with her brother and Soil Scientist Dr. Rebekka Artz. She created a body of landscape paintings of large stretched canvases, linens and water colours of Scottish wetlands and bogs which became a travelling exhibition called “Beauty and the bog”.
The paintings occasionally have dried plant specimens collaged into the image. Carol uses a wide variety of mixed media ranging from acrylic paint; pastels; charcoal and pure powder pigment mixed with rabbit skin glue and shellac painted onto large stretched linens and canvas, as well as water colour, graphite and pastel paintings on cotton rag paper. Drawing and photography are constant research tools. In recent years she has also used photography as a fine art medium in its own right to create a variety of different images. These range from limited edition black and white Micrographs taken from dissected plant specimens through a scanning electron microscope to limited edition Giclee prints of dried plant specimens taken through a Lite microscope. Carol also produces Wood Engraving prints.
The research year at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh gave Carol an incredible opportunity to lay down a fundamental research base through painting, drawing and photography that will inform her work as an artist for many years to come.
