My practice explores how textiles, patterns and crafted objects hold cultural memory and spiritual knowledge. Working across painting, print and textiles, I combine traditional handicraft with digital and mechanical processes to investigate relationships between landscape, ancestry, ritual and contemporary identity.
I grew up in rural Wiltshire, surrounded by ancient sites such as Wayland’s Smithy and White Horse Hill, and in a highly ornamental Greek-Cypriot home layered with textiles, Lefkara lace, embroidery and tapestry. Early collages—posters Blu-Tacked onto floral Laura Ashley wallpaper—established an instinct to layer, disrupt and re-stage histories. Grids derived from my mother’s tapestry patterns and my father’s town-planning drawings continue to structure my work.
My practice-based PhD, The Future Needs the Past: Remaking William Morris through Contemporary Art Practice, undertaken in partnership with the William Morris Gallery, deepened my interest in craft, pattern and the ways in which historical revivals persist in the present. I treat inherited imagery and fabrics not as something to preserve intact, but as material to be reconfigured and reactivated.
Archival imagery from books, museums and digital repositories—including botanical illustrations, architectural diagrams, medieval text, Arts and Crafts patterns and needlework designs—is repeatedly printed, scanned, layered, fragmented and erased. I move fluidly between hand and machine, analogue and digital, abstraction and representation, allowing these boundaries to remain unresolved.
Memory, repetition and ruination are central to this process. I think of painting as a form of contemporary archaeology: images are excavated, reproduced, obscured and partially buried again. Repetition can preserve while simultaneously degrading; erasure can destroy while revealing. The resulting fragments occupy a space between presence and absence, recognition and illegibility.
My engagement with yoga, QiGong, meditation, Tarot, Buddhism and Taoism informs an increasing interest in rhythm, attention, embodiment and contemplative making. Rather than illustrating spiritual beliefs, I am interested in how spiritual and cosmological knowledge becomes embedded within materials, patterns, landscapes and acts of making. Ultimately, I seek to create layered spaces where different histories and temporalities coexist—where the past is not reconstructed intact, but continually remembered, disrupted and remade.
Diana Taylor, 2026