Sarah Taylor Silverwood
Kathleen and Sally series
To coincide with the display of the Garman Ryan collection through 2020, work by Birmingham based artist Sarah Taylor Silverwood will displayed within our Floor 2 temporary exhibition space.
This body of drawings is based on text and images abstracted from photographs, letters, and documents relating to the two creators and donors of the Garman Ryan Collection, Kathleen Epstein (née Garman) and Sally Ryan.
Their extraordinary lives were the starting point for Sarah Taylor Silverwood’s exploration into wider ideas around womanhood and representations of femininity during her extended residency in the Artists’ Studio through 2014.
Sarah Taylor Silverwood’s representations of images in the archive are combined and layered with altered pages from British and American magazines dating from the 1940s through to the 1970s, echoing the era from which most of the archive material originates. The original magazine pages reflect post-war, socially-constructed notions of feminine beauty but these ideals are interrupted by the artist’s alterations to the content. The mass produced images and hand-rendered drawings envelop one another, and transmute into a wider comment on womanhood.
