Featured Artist Nicola Taylor

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

 

Photo of woman on windy day

 

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.

 

Fairy in the woods

 

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.

 

Blindfolded woman with long scarf

 

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.

 

Woman walking on the moors

 

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.

 

Mysterious woman on the moors

 

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.

 

Woman with Scarf on the Moors

 

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.

Comments

  1. These photographs are intriguing and stunning! Beautiful work.

  2. Wow! So evocative of emotion and a whole story in each image. Thank you for highlighting this very talented artist (photographer’s) work! Brilliant!

    • Hi Gwen!

      Yes, the images are meant to be a collection of stories around a theme, rather than illustrations to one unified story. So glad that you like them and thanks for your kind words on my blog.

      Nicola x

  3. Thank you for featuring this amazing artist! Her work is truly beautiful and inspired, and it was such a joy to see.

    • Hi Anna,

      So glad that you like my work. Just had a look at your Etsy site and your work is just lovely. I love vintage botanical and natualist illustrations and your work really captures that aesthetic.

      Nicola x

  4. Brian Milner says

    Really love your work I have four on my walls,they are intriguing to look at they make you imagine where they are.

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  1. […] was so excited to be featured on Carolyn Edlund’s Artsy Shark blog recently. A big hello to anyone who has discovered my work through Carolyn’s wonderful […]

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