Joanna Kinnersly-Taylor
Joanna’s printed textile practice embraces one-off works for exhibition, interiors and commissions. She also run courses in her Glasgow studio and offers bespoke one-to-one working. Currently expanding and updating her book ‘Dyeing and Screen-Printing on Textiles’ (3rd edition) for Bloomsbury.
Layers intrigue her– metaphorically and physically – informing the content and production of her work. Responding to daily life within the domestic interior, her abstract work takes inspiration from details of household objects to larger architectural elements, exploring their interplay and juxtaposition. Using the window as allegorical motif for a liminal state that expresses time and light, mood is conveyed through representation of shadow, developed from her photographs.
Linen is Joanna’s fabric of choice – the grain particularly suited to translation of photographic elements, the fibres highly receptive to dye and stripping back, creating richness and resilience. Her printing style is underpinned by developing limited colour palettes through a rigorous sampling methodology, these often becoming works in themselves. Dyeing, painting and screen-printing, her multi-layered approach creates positive and negative space by ‘carving out’ through the push and pull of adding and removing colour. Logistically complex, but intrinsic to the visual construct, it creates a shifting resonance whilst achieving depth and transparency – architectural and ethereal space.
Commissions in the public realm draw threads from the locality to create a sensitive and poetic response, keying into the memory and nature of the space.
Joanna’s textiles vary greatly in scale and are wall-based – framed and unframed – or hang in free space as more three-dimensional objects, sewn into simple domestic forms like pillowcases or bolster covers.
