My name is Sulene Taylor. After a long process of elimination, currently I choose to portray my art through digital techniques. The key theme in my body of art is currently about the mind as a house, that what you deliberately allow in your thoughts, involuntarily permits and consequently do with it. It is of interest to me how we decorate this “mind house” and how to organise it. My digitally manipulated photographs and drawings are about collected under #themindisahouse theme.
The aim with my work is to represent what I think about in my life journey and what I choose to allow in my mind. These transformed photographs and drawings are created to address that what we consciously and sometimes unconsciously decide to set foot in our minds. It is important to take note of our thinking, because what we reflect upon often end up as deeds which shape our future. These works of art are also to encourage interested parties to carefully consider the spaces where we allow our minds to wander and wonder.
During and after my BA Visual Arts studies, I took part in some group exhibitions. The main medium which I excelled in, used and enjoyed was installation art. These works were dealing with philosophies on how the mind can be trained to surpass trauma.
I learned through my own experiences that it is possible to find a “new normal” despite painful circumstances. It became a crucial part of my values to challenge and address old negative thought patterns to change myself and my life on a continuous basis, in order to not only survive, but to shine in life with a renewed mindset.
Thankfully I have an exploring and creative mind and am always on the look for an better solution to any type of challenge. After my studies through Unisa, I decided to investigate how to change my own style by adapting my art medium. I wanted to go from huge and laborious works in massive spaces to a small tidy place. And since I spent years doing graphic art in business, it became a natural process to integrate digital methods with my philosophy and life passions. It became a much more suitable medium which can easily be adapted to travelling while at the same time relay my artist message.
I enjoy the beautification and ordering of physical interior and exterior spaces, that is houses, rooms, gardens, cupboards and gardens, so it made sense to explore this concept further. In my examinations, I found that the spiritual atmosphere of unseen spaces and invisible spatial borders have an emotional impact on human beings.
Sometimes we might become aware of moving across an imperceptible margin and other times we might experience a vague awareness of something that has shifted, but don’t know the basis of it.
In architecture, lines and volumes between structural solids (positive) create open negative spaces. Even if we cannot see “space” with our eyes, it is defined by the boundaries of walls, ceilings, textures, light and shadows. Whether it is a manmade building, nature created formations, containers, cupboards, time structures, the past, relationships, or in one’s mind; that is an area is defined by any type of margin and impact our feelings and responses. My investigations slowly developed into the concept of “a spatial territory in our heads”.
The concept that our mind is a house is not a new one. It is talked about in literature from thousands of years past, philosophers from old and since a few decades ago it has been renewed in memory techniques and is currently also used in trauma counselling, in which I was trained. The idea of beautifying and decorating this thought space is of distinct interest to me.
Different people will fill this “mind house” with a diversity of alternative features. Each one will differ vastly from another on how and why they consent outside influences to shape their intellectual and emotional area. Consequently, the construct of physical spaces is fascinating to me, but even more is what fills the spatial area inside our heads, namely #themindisahouse.
One of the many tools I use to renew my mind is hiking, an outdoor passion of mine. This has an influence on how I manage my thought palace. It provides emotional relaxation and releases “feel good hormones” because of the combination of being in nature and physical exertion. While I do not go fast, climbing rocks and uneven the terrain is especially enjoyable. It is fascinating how my subconscious mind would automatically know where to move the next hand of foot to enable safety while moving up or down moderate cliff faces. During hiking I would try to find unusual angles and vistas to photograph as part of my experience in nature. It is a challenge to enter a space where my physical abilities are put to the test and to navigate the environment with only a few essential items to achieve an pleasing outcome. This type of challenge can also be decoded to emotional experiences when one must deal with uncomfortable feelings.
Furthermore, another one of my delights is to keep my hands active and busy. It can happen with fabric, but any type of material will do, with the intention of achieving the restoration of interior spaces, fix broken objects or construct new functional or decorative objects. Photographs of such plus gardening also tends to find their way into my art. Creativity and gardening is a practical expression of my enjoyment and can link boundaries of actual spaces or objects and visually express a full life without using language.
Therefore, every image used in the digital art collection, #themindisahouse, contains something to do with a spatial environment. How we steer our movements in or around a physical or mental space can help us to determine our position in our thinking. This conscious orienteering can reveal a massive ‘thought’ building or the construct of tiny intimate parts of a home ‘feeling’.
In practice, I take photos with my cell phone, a modern digital attachment to my hands. As I see, I take snapshots of interesting architectural structures I notice. These physical space images then get altered through digital techniques and fused with pictures or drawings which represent what I am observing or doing. Some of my earlier exhibited artworks have also been photographed as they are a part of my journey through life and are thus included into my process of studying a new way of doing life.
In my medium and techniques, I would also combine various images with intellectual subjects and spiritual principles which I often ponder upon during critical thinking.
As I love to write creatively in order to sort through such conundrums and interesting theories, I can adjust and readjust words and sentences to create an ultimate expression of language. Sometimes I can pinpoint emotions into definite words, and other times I need to work with the thoughts and feelings through pictures.
A typical quality of mine is that I can see unusual relationships between objects or spaces, whether it is physical, spiritual or emotional. This alternative perspective enables me to build my own preferred style and theme and for the time being I like building on this method.
The Facebook business account goes back to later in my art studies, while all the artwork on my Instagram account up to this point (2023) is based on the theme #themindisahouse.
It is about thought patterns in the soul and is a large learning pointer in my own life to renew my mind on a continuous basis. I am passionate about this art collection.
#sulenetaylorart #sulenetaylor #themindisahouse