Cold Climes: On the work of Camara Taylor
Commissioned by Katherine Murphy for 'Unfolding: Correspondent', a project with Dundee Contemporary Arts, this new writing engages with climate in the work of Glasgow-based artist Camara Taylor
Cold Climes
Untitled (Paul’s Hands, 1930)
Giclee Print, Coloured Glass, Blackened oak frame, 81x55cm, 2024. Commissioned by Glasgow International 2024. Photo: Matthew Arthur Williams
Work made over the past five years, from previous exhibitions at Collective, Edinburgh and Cubitt, London, as well as new works on paper by Camara Taylor constitute their presentation within the exhibition, Soft Impressions, alongside new work by Ingrid Pollard and Helen Cammock.
Situated within the exhibition, which relates the three artists’ work in print as a strategic rejoinder between their practices, Taylor’s presentation expands on what might be included within this medium or process of ‘print.’ The works they present here move from photography that moves from the intimate to the illegible, to reproductions of historic paintings by Robert S. Duncanson that have been transformed by alcohol and water. These new and old works are displayed amongst the print works created by Taylor’s intergenerational peers. At the back of the gallery there is a screening room where we encounter nobody’s word (2024) a digital video work bringing together family VHS footage and voice notes.
The spaces within which most of these works are housed in Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) manage to both inspire thinking to the legacy of the city’s industrial history - with sawtooth roofs spilling light onto the walls and floors of its pristine galleries - as well as a bigness of sky that sometimes feels so evasive in other parts of Scotland. The skylights above our heads in these galleries make the most of Dundee’s often self-lauded position as ‘Scotland’s sunniest city’ and marks this space in contrast to Taylor’s home of Glasgow (the UK’s rainiest city if account is taken of days of rain per annum).
Weather is more than a conversational subject for polite blether when situated in proximity to Taylor and their practice, and in fact when we talk about climate, we talk about a mood, a moment, a feeling that is circulating. Taylor has previously discussed the presence of the cold - which fellow Glasgow-based artist Tako Taal details is in fact, a lack of warmth - through a series on MAP magazine that began with a reference amongst the text to a comment made of the Windrush generation making their way to the United Kingdom from the West Indies that Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones made, that these new arrivals ‘would not last one winter in England anyway.’1
Untitled (Falls of Clyde, 1492, 1707- ), installation view, Tramway, Glasgow 2024
Uncoated mild steel, Clear PVC Pipe, Clear Hose, Dark Caribbean Rum,
Dirty Water Pump, Glass Tank, dimensions variable. Photo: Matthew Arthur Williams
Research & Design by Camara Taylor and Sharif Elsabagh, Steel Fabrication by Ella Appleton, Gemma Moncrieff and the Slaghammers feminist welding collective. Commissioned by Glasgow International with production and presentation support from Tramway.
In thinking through climate - and not just the sometimes-oppressive cold of Scotland which I discuss with Taylor, Taal, and others in our circles who have made the inverse of my life-journey from Scotland south to England - we can think through a climate of intolerance, a tension, a political climate of indifference. But specifically the climate that I relate to Taylor’s practice, is one form of comprehending anti-Blackness not as a linear history with which we can engage as we might other linear histories, but instead as a mood, as a feeling, a something that hangs in the air, heavy and weighty, with tangible effects that are easier to point to than the sum of the thing itself. Something which Christina Sharpe details as existing at the same time in different ways for different communities – even as you may experience the same weather event, something about climate also allows you to experience the same weather event but in a very different register.2
The cold, in Scotland, is as present in the climate of the landscape itself, as much as it is present in the manners and the dialogue of a country and its cities still adjusting to - or, resisting - discourses of race and Blackness from which it has largely recused itself through its even-more-dominant-than-England’s whiteness. The cold can appear just as easily in moments of Reasonable Conversation as much as it can come in moments of aversion to such conversations. There is a cold to a reassuring voice describing a Black artist’s work as timely or important. It is in a white curator’s voice telling people how much they learned from XYZ.
This cold shoulder to dealing with such legacies has been largely dealt with through language of white curators and white organisations which speak Thoughtfully, Carefully, of colonial architectures, of legacies and histories, of commitments to Doing Better and Listening3. They call it timely, like Black death is once again present after an assumed absence, reminiscent of a past, as if there was a gap somewhere, a pause, turadh.4
The artistic practices produced in such a climate largely bend to the whims of those eager to Listen but less eager to action from such Listening. The act of Listening has been paralleled by a proliferation of works which largely speak to these conditions. This climate has developed an impulse to platform and develop work which is largely didactic. Which tells.
[Some of] Camara Taylor’s Work (as encountered in Soft Impressions on a sunny day in late February 2025)
On entering the gallery the first encounter is with two wall-mounted works. On a cheap piece of MDF board there is an inkjet photo printed with a portrait of a Black woman. Most of her face is not visible, warped like a dream sequence effect, splitting two halves of the portrait across a white and black background. Her eyes and nose are somewhere amongst the warped noise, but all that is visible is patterned wallpaper behind her, a beehive updo, and on the lower half of the portrait, lips that are maybe smiling (a smile would be easier to spot if her eyes were visible), a high-neck, sleeveless blouse with a floral pattern. The photograph has been printed on this cheap, standard print paper with the black ink removed from the printer, the result is an almost sepia warmth to the work, which is pinned to a cheap board with no framing. The thinness of the paper is visible. The exhibition handout tells you that the pins forming an abstract shape next to the print on the board are from a gramophone.
Next to this is a framed photograph of a pair of black bare feet, mid-motion, jumping from a carpeted stairway, wearing tartan pyjamas. Nothing above the mid-shin is visible.
In the following gallery the full extent of the East Coast sun is illuminating the room. There is a wet slick sheen pooling and glinting on the surfaces of reproductions of African-American painter Robert S. Duncanson’s paintings of Scottish landscapes that are illuminated by this harsh sun. Closer on the surfaces of the print reproductions, and in points bordering the blackened oak frames, there are spots of mould visible. Three of these are on the floor, and you see a gallery worker misting them with a rum, whisky and water solution as you sit on the floor, looking across at the sheen of their surfaces. Another work is on the wall but the proliferation of mould has rendered it an abstract image, it is almost completely blackened with mould, held, unlike the works on the floor, behind a layer of glass.
Untitled (re/decomposition 4, 1871, 2021, 2022) Silver Gelatin Print; Blackened Oak Frame, 116 x 80cm, 2022
Photo: Tom Nolan cc: ‘Scottish Landscape’,1871, oil on canvas Robert S Duncanson;
rum and whiskey; accumulated matter (mould), stilled after (duration) one year.
Adverse Weather
In starting points, the images, histories and materials that Taylor gathers might speak to an alignment with what Hal Foster coined ‘the archival impulse’ in his 2004 essay of the same name. The archival art Foster describes begins, essentially, with the intent of making historical information, often lost, displaced, or overlooked, physically present.
What differs this archival moment in Taylor’s work, from practices that might seek simply a point of representation - writing into history, putting X type of bodies into a salubrious gallery and declaring decolonisation, queering, victory for the working classes etc - is the transformative and sometimes failing use of materials to eschew a wholly definable and digestible image.
Whilst the images of the work themselves hold value, they do more under Taylor’s bringing-together than simply having ‘collated its different signs [...] to ascertain what might remain for the present.’ They are unable to hold the weight of a ‘representation’ through various ways that Taylor makes their forms illegible - faces are barely visible, names and words are redacted, a whole landscape is consumed, eaten by mould. Even in the rare moments where Taylor’s own body features in their work it is distanced from a situating of their self at the centre of work, but also the wider conversations around it. Colour inversions make them difficult to make out, basic and sometimes crass post-production editing techniques make their figure more abstract. We don’t hear their voice, though in suspiration ! (2021) a video work previously shown at Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival and the Whitechapel Gallery, London, we do hear air repeatedly escaping their cunt.
The ways in which Taylor’s works present such historical information again speaks more to ‘climate’ than a specificity. There is, of course, a specificity, but it doesn’t necessarily belong to us as viewers. There are unique weather events (read: things, information) to encounter within their work in exhibitions of theirs – images of Black students at the University of Edinburgh; home videos stitched with the chatter of family conversation around which Scottish families in the Caribbean owned the slaves from whom (we assume) Taylor’s family descends; romantic landscapes undergoing a slow transformation in rum and whisky; in other exhibitions; lyrics from a Nina Simone song; a replica coin melting on the artists tongue; metal pipes pumping spit, rum and beats across a dripping, eroding, steel surface.
The encounters with these images, with these works, might interact with those encountering them variously as; a soft opaque mist, a gentle rain, a crack of thunder, an unbearable heat that suffocates. The event of coming into proximity with such information is more than a looking-onto-or-through an archive. It is an active encounter[s] that does away with any assumption ‘that “we” are all in the world in the same way, that we experience suffering on the same plain, that we can be “repaired” in the same way.’ to once again recall the words of Christina Sharpe.
In refraining from didacticism or cohesion that can dominate multidisciplinary artistic practices, Taylor’s work is not always edited to a finality. A hallmark of previous shows has been various materials that feel to varying degrees as experiments or as something unfinished. In contrast to some of the transformational processes other information has undergone they are simply gathered.
Paper notations and materials that feel like scrap have appeared in previous iterations of their work. Detours can be followed easily if one focuses for example, on deciphering what might be meant by Noodles who rave for abolition (engraved on a gold lighter in 2021), revealing a lifting from poems written by Scottish diarist James Boswell, who enthusiastically supported the institution of slavery. These detours, through these assemblages also operate to elicit hunches, and affects and effects in different ways.
There is not a singular narrative in Taylor’s work but as with Françoise Vergès writing on the archive - ‘it is meaningful in its context: it is not “truth”, but it belongs to an entire social environment.’5 The social environment to which Taylor’s work can both develop from, but also result in, focus on very particular aspects of the work. Perhaps on elements that are given more of this idea of Importance and Timeliness I have previously remarked upon. This direction of attention amongst a series of juxtapositions makes it difficult to say, as I have previously in a film festival setting, to a room of ‘arts professionals’ that one of the things you liked about the film-collage that spoke of breathlessness, societal violence and love, was the queefing.
Untitled (re/de/composition 2), 125 x 74cm, 2021-
Robert S. Duncanson, Dog’s Head of Scotland (1870, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) reproduction on Fine Art Museum Archival Paper, acrylic tray, handframed in oak and submerged in rum, whiskey and water.
Climate Control
If we consider again the ways that the same weather events can affect us differently, with a nod to Sharpe, and consider also the ways that the social environment constitutes a ‘thing’ as well as a ‘place’, with a nod to Vergès and to Scotland’s cold, we can agree that a relation between physical environment and social environment is tricky to describe, with opportunities for both to be both constitutive and contradictory of the other.
I won’t be elaborating on, clarifying, nor describing the nature of this relation here6, and instead will just let this trickiness speak through works previously described in this writing which formed a significant part of Taylor’s work in Soft Impressions, which have now been seen variously in exhibitions in London, Edinburgh and Dundee.
These works, including Untitled (re/decomposition 4, 1871, 2021, 2022), Untitled (re/decomposition 4), Untitled (re/de/composition 3), Untitled (re/decomposition 1), comprise of a series of reproductions of Scottish landscape paintings by African-American painter Robert S Duncanson, made during a tour of his of the British Isles, held variously in collections including The Smithsonian Museum and Detroit Institute of Arts7.
Three of the works on the floor are regularly misted with a solution of water, whisky, and rum by gallery workers holding spray bottles that I have never seen before, and they sit with pools in the recesses of warping paper. The materials have changed the nature of the images, mostly in small manners - with the archival paper of these reproductions curled and bloated at points. In various points there are spots of mould - three grey-black dots spottle the surface, floating above and independent from a mountainside by Loch Katrine, surrounded by the warmth of a sunset or a sunrise.
Another work, mounted on the wall, previously shown at Edinburgh’s Collective gallery is completely illegible. Mould that the artist estimates grew for around twelve months has made any image reproduced on its surface completely invisible.
Climate, then, becomes present again. Mould, produced by moist environments thrived in the materials brought together by Taylor, but additionally speaks to what exists outside of the works themselves. Just as the archive is constituted environmentally, so too are works that exist within the trajectory of an artists’ practice constituted by the spaces in which they are produced and made public.
Camara Taylor first presented some of these particular works at Cubitt Gallery in London, where I am currently working as Curatorial Fellow. Previous Curatorial Fellows Languid Hands (an artistic and curatorial collaboration between Rabz Lansiquot and Imani Robinson) had invited Taylor to partake in their programme, No Real Closure, which featured new work by British artists of Afro-Caribbean descent.
It is, therefore, with some intimacy with the space that I speak of these works, and understanding the gallery in which their first public outing took place. The gallery is located in a mews, with a floor listed for its architectural heritage, with a slight slope and uneven surface leading to ridged tiles that lead, finally to a drain, down which horse piss once flowed during this building’s life as a stable. In other lives the building was a press. It now houses the gallery where Taylor presented their first solo exhibition, a rant! a reel! (2021)
Two large skylights of the gallery are less watertight than those of Dundee Contemporary Arts’ galleries. There are single panes of glass which are stained, cracked and vulnerable. Leaks are not uncommon. Walls can become moist and the space itself can become humid in suffocating summer heat, or dreich in winter rain. In working with Marlene Smith on her solo exhibition in the same place8, I had to warn her that sculptures she had made from fondant sugar might be vulnerable to the climatic conditions of the space.
The vulnerability of form in Taylor’s work was exacerbated by the conditions within which their work was made public and within which the work is being produced now. There is an intimacy with mould for most millennial renters – its presence and image becoming part of our shared aesthetic experiences of generational precarity. The climate of outdoors often enters this gallery and therefore, the borders between the work and the climate it sits within become, at the least, contested. This phenomenon is not specific to this gallery, and in fact only becomes evident when contrasted with the galleries of spaces like DCA - where the climate can be controlled. Where humidity and heat can be manipulated to preserve a work in perpetuity.
The idea of the condition of work holds a very different weight in a space where care for such work can include tight, specific, monitored control. Cubitt, as with many other spaces in post-industrial buildings across the United Kingdom, has no such control, no matter how much care might be discussed or applied. This points, of course, to the development and the trajectory of an artistic practice, and the sorts of spaces which support such development over the course of a career - of the change that takes place with an increase of institutionalisation. But moreso, in Taylor’s material based works specifically, they are themselves constituted by the climates they sit within, the weather they endure, the adverse effects that unfold, uneasy political climates, the cold of the north, the climate of anti-Blackness or of austerity. The politics of such material production could also be extrapolated from the work in Taylor’s contribution to Soft Impressions all having been produced without the assistance of DCA’s print workshops - a decision made by the artist based on the workshop’s financial support from the Elizabeth Murdoch-headed Freelands Foundation.
They gesture outwards to that which constituted them. Taylor’s work is drawn from specific and intentional materials, resources and construction - collaborations with Glasgow-based women’s welding collective Slaghammers is as constitutive of recent work exhibited, as the need for a climate of cold, damp, and moist. It is in the atrophy of such gathered materials, put in place with collaborators, whether the wearing of cheap paper, the disappearance of a chocolate coin from the heat of a body, or the spreading of mould on a wet paper’s surface, which aligns Taylor’s practice to more unknowns and more vulnerabilities.
Theirs is a practice within which various conditions are implicated; lived, environmental, institutional. Their work is untimely because it is with and without time, it is fleeting and it is talking of forever, it could be always. Their work is unimportant, because it is a collection of things, often gathered in a lived-austerity, reliant on the post-imperial, failing British state’s propensity to sully, for materials and ideas to curdle or to atrophy. The work is illegible at points, evasive, and whilst a recent piece of writing by Tendai John Mutambu on Donald Rodney’s work asked9, in quoting artist Carolyn Lazard, can the Black medicalised subject speak? A question which we might direct towards Taylor’s work is wondering if such a subject might instead scream, silence itself, or verbalise in another way that is errant to the Listener’s ear.
‘Introduction to the Cold’, Camara Taylor, 2020, Available: https://mapmagazine.co.uk/introduction-to-the-cold
‘Antiblack weather vs Microclimates’, Christina Sharpe, 2017, Available: https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/14-toxic-atmospheres/32058-2
As with any time I am writing about white people, white curators, I refer to the we (on) of Annie Ernaux’s The Years (Les Années) I am implicating myself actively through this we (on)
Turadh is a Scottish Gaelic word describing a brief sunny spell, a gap of sunshine in between two periods of rain
‘Methodology for a Creole Museum, For a Postcolonial Museum of the Living Present’ Françoise Vergès, 2008, Available: https://www.archimuse.com/mw2008/papers/verges/verges.html
I’m not qualified to do so
At the time of writing, around one week previous, the Smithsonian had been taken under direct governance by President Donald Trump, with the White House citing their goal to use the museum to demonstrate American society’s unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.
The Detroit Institute of Arts, in Detroit, a city which similarly to the United Kingdom’s Birmingham and wider West Midlands region, was famed for its motor-manufacturing as well as both cities’ rich contributions to Black culture being demonstrated (somewhat) in their public collections which were made vulnerable to sell-offs following bankruptcy of the city of Detroit (2013) and Birmingham (2024).
Camara Taylor and Marlene Smith hosted an in-conversation on the event of Ah, Sugar at The Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery. More here: https://gsaexhibitions.co.uk/exhibition/rrs-in-conversation-with-marlene-smith-and-camara-taylor/
‘How Donald Rodney Found Refuge for the Black Body’, Tendai John Mutambu, Available: https://artreview.com/how-donald-rodney-found-refuge-for-the-black-body-whitechapel-gallery-tendai-mutambu/