Camilla Taylor: 静かな友達 - Quiet Friend

7 September - 8 October 2022

“Quiet Friend is about a companionship that is unchosen. Connections and actions made unconsciously, seeping out and connecting us to each other like invisible dark strands of beads.

The animals and people who fill the spaces that we make, find places in the gaps of our lives and find a place to live in the world that we create.

When I was very young, I worked as a baker. I would rise at 3 or 4 am and walk to the commercial kitchen while the city was still dark. Few were awake, but the animals were, and I’d pass by the clouds of moths swirling around lamplights, and the wakening starlings greeting each other and seeking out sustenance.

I studied entomology before I decided to become an artist. Despite my love for insects, this is the first solo exhibit in which I’ve included insects as part of the artwork. I’ve been hesitant to incorporate them because of the way others react with horror, but this series is the perfect opportunity. There’s an ambivalence between the horror to the situation simultaneous to the coziness of companionship, between repulsive and poetic.

We don’t always want the company that arrives, and like family, we don’t get to choose each other. Whether it be words, secrets, emotions or uninviting companions of ours, the invisible is now made visible.”

Camilla Taylor
Murmuration

"The starling is an animal originally from Europe that has been introduced to nearly every continent,

and has found the urban environs we build a welcoming space.

As we grapple with the changes wrought be the Anthropocene, we are accompanied by many

who have adapted alongside us."
"Like us, the moths and the starlings move in groups, unorganized and in great masses, the individual lost amongst the crowds.

The individual is hiding in the group, emerging and hiding again in the murmuration of the starling or the eclipse of the moth."
- Camilla Taylor, Starling, Banking, 2022
- Camilla Taylor, Starling, Alighting, 2022
Eclipse

"The moths are there with us through our life, like the starlings, small and hidden and sometimes in great unpleasant masses. And then in the end, when we pass, they can take a small piece of us and making something new with it."
"Grease moths, Aglossa cuprina, are small moths that live on grease from plants an animals. Because of this, they can become pests in commercial kitchens with oil build up. They’ve been found wherever humans are, traveling with us to all of the places that we make, enjoying the same things we enjoy.

Grease moths are also the only moth that has been found to consume the flesh of corpses, eating the fat from our bodies once we are dead."
Mud Body

The Mud Body series is of bodies coming into and out of being,

in the process between being fully formed and dissolved back into the metaphorical “mud” from which we were formed.
- Camilla Taylor, Mud Body (Standing), 2022
- Camilla Taylor, Mud Body (Torso), 2022
A poem

A poem and its last secret line
The invisible

A collection of the inadvertent, the accidental, the things concealed.
(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
Camilla Taylor's Atelier

A video will be displayed at the gallery showing some bits of the creative process.
Artwork photo credit: Kanda & Oliveira, Camilla Taylor

Installation photo credit: Takahashi Munemasa

Please do not use images without permission