Elizabeth Jane Taylor: Disco Chair

About the artist

Elizabeth Jane Taylor is a Cambridge-based printmaker and mixed media artist with a practice spanning over 20 years. Her work is rooted in a career as a seed analyst, where the professional requirement for precise identification through shape, colour, and texture became a foundational element of her visual language. Working across screen printing, collagraph, lino, and drypoint, she translates botanical observations and personal locations into reinterpreted memories.

The physical process of making is central to Taylor's output. She focuses on the manual preparation of hand-cut paper stencils for screen printing and the tactile resistance of cutting lino plates. These traditional methods allow her to filter direct observations from nature through a subjective lens, moving away from literal botanical illustration toward a more emotive representation of subject matter.

Her featured work, ‘Disco Chair’, demonstrates a shift from the natural world to the studio environment and social spaces. This eight-layered screen print—constructed from two photo-screens and six hand-cut stencils—was developed from observations of light during a birthday celebration. It captures the fleeting, artificial arrangements produced by disco lighting, using a complex layering process to recreate the specific atmosphere of the event.

A regular exhibitor with the Cambridge Drawing Society since 2004, Taylor has also shown work at the Southbank Printmakers Mini Print Exhibitions and the Red Dot Exhibition in Aldeburgh. Her work frequently incorporates hand-coloured papers and mixed media, reflecting an ongoing studio exploration of how physical materials can be manipulated to link still life with personal narrative.