Jojo Taylor

The lost and the found – Jojo Taylor, 2012

Much of Jojo’s work deals with ideas around the mysterious and the uneasy.

Inspiration from researching the paranormal and exploring the realms of the unknown, has meant themes such as angels, ghosts, life between lives and death have featured in her work.

Jojo occasionally works in collaboration with other professionals such as hypnotherapists and composers and underwent past life regression in order to access and explore some of her past life memories which resulted in a body of work focusing on the notion of souls and reincarnation.

Another element of her work involves gathering and re-energising ‘found’ photographs from house clearances and second hand markets by making collages and paintings. These works centre on her fascination with loss and the human response to loss. Jojo presents the original image to the world again in a renewed visual and temporal context, thereby striving to give them a new lease of life and to immortalise something of the lives they are a testimony to.

For Jojos latest installation she collected hundreds of domestic glass paraphernalia and painstakingly resurrecting them into a suspended cluster whilst incorporating changing coloured lighting.

Jojo is not tied to any one medium or method in her work but uses a variety, including sculpture, drawing, photography, sewing, printing, installation, film, performance and painting, sometimes incorporating, sound, light, kinetics and pre loved paraphernalia with found objects. Jojo is also working on a technique she calls ‘Smoke-a-graphs’.

‘Smoke-a-graphs’ are both delicate and eerie. Backlighting reveals bodies that appear like apparitions, as images etched in fine detail, in smokey soot on glass patinas. Smoke-a-graphs give a sense of macabre voyeurism, the fine particles of soot freezing decay in a futile attempt to cling to life after death: A whisp of hair, wrinkles on a hand or a crease in the subject’s attire. These images of bodies are displayed in coloured light boxes and are part of the ‘Body Snatchers’ series.

Jojo is the singer and lyricist in the band ‘Lika Sharps’ whose music and performance has been described as ‘passionate and enigmatic’, for whom she also creates theatrical costumes and props.