I grew up in rural Wiltshire, amid ancient sites like Wayland’s Smithy and White Horse Hill, and in a highly ornamental home, layered with Greek‑Cypriot textiles, Lefkara lace, samplers, embroideries and tapestries. Early collages—posters blu‑tacked onto floral Laura Ashley paper—set my instinct to layer, disrupt, and re-stage histories. Family influences (a painter–illustrator grandmother and an architect–draughtsman great‑grandfather), alongside grids taken from my mum's tapestry patterns and my father’s town‑planning graph papers, inform the non‑narrative structures in my work. Grids anchor floating vestiges as I move between painting and “un‑painting,” collage and erasure. My practice-based PhD with the William Morris Gallery deepened my interest in materials, pattern, and how revivals haunt the present- living in an age of the ‘re’.

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Working across painting, print, and textiles, I hybridise traditional handicraft with digital and mechanical processes. exploring how well-being can be integrated within an approach which draws upon the saturation of information in our current digital era. Archival images from obsolete books, museum archives, and online ruins: botanical plates, architectural diagrams, medieval prints, Arts & Crafts patterns, Victorian needlework schemes, and infographics are layered, fragmented, scanned, and reworked.

In this way, I explore how the past ruptures and reappears in an age of the “re”—repetition, revival, and remediation. By recombining domestic patterns with ancient landscapes and popular iconography, I seek to re‑materialise and reconfigure history that acknowledges what is missing, what returns, and what can be reassembled now.

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Diana Taylor, 2026.