Speakers biographies
Michael Taylor is a South African artist, living and working in Cape Town. He works predominantly in the mediums of drawing and painting. Michael mimics the immediate and gestural language of the drawing to develop scenes and characters in his painted work. Removed from its purely observational qualities, drawing becomes a projection of the artist’s intuition, imagination and memory.
Representational and figurative elements in Taylor’s paintings create narrative frameworks that are unravelled to varying degrees through abstract marking. These loose storylines are then fastened to titles that spark moments of recognition in his chronicles of masculinity, camp theatricality, personal and cultural mythology, and humanity in all its pomp and ineptitude.
Nico Kos Earle is a writer and curator who spent her formative years in Paris, with an MA in Literature with Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin. Vice Chair of the Critics Circle, she has a column on Artlyst (A Quiet Lunch /Huffington Post) and ongoing collaboration with The Colour Project. Focused on developing artists in early to mid career, she regularly writes catalogue and title essays and poetry for a wide range of artists (Hamish Mackie, Nancy Cadogan, Deborah Tarr, Chris Levine, Aigana Gali, Andrea Hamilton).
Her most recent books include Joost Vandebrug's Cince Lei, Jeff Becton, Emma Witter and Nelio Sonego, Museum of Rome. She has curated numerous shows on the theme of our connection to nature (Botanicae, Sense of Place, DRIFT, SURFACE, Sacred Geometry) and conceived of the BLUE Edition, first inaugurated at AH Studios, for Blue Marine Foundation.
Nico is currently working on a series of poems, a special commission for the Science Museum, and short film Oceanum Voces with Dawn Dudek.
