Ken Taylor

Car Quarantine ? - Photographic Conversations

29th May - 31st August……… Extended to September 21st 2020

“Coronavirus is here to stay. This is not a war. It is a symbiosis*. We have to adapt”.

David Hildick-Smith; Professor of Cardiology, Brighton and Sussex University Hospitals. (Letter to the Guardian 14th April 2020.)

As the lockdown continued, and my exercise walking regime marched on, I continued to take photographs, as I do. These have evolved into this analogous conversation to my early lockdown postcard album, “The Outside Coming In”. “Car Quarantine ?” thus becomes a late lockdown collection, in that it observes cars acquiring gossamer overlays as they take on an enforced redundancy.

Everywhere, I could see the cover of my 2016 album, “Reflections”, being reproduced as contemplative pools of imagined water. Car windows were not only engulfed in petals, but became recipients of the silence around me, shadowing the sky and the surrounding trees. This tranquil image became the eastern side of the diptychs I was orchestrating. They are counterpointed by the images of car covers. Wrapping things, as the artist Christo has highlighted, always has an elusive intrigue. However, there is added melancholy evident in attempting to weatherproof a machine into immortality.

The resulting compositions are numbered as conversations rather than located. This reflects the ubiquity of industrial consumerism, observed in Marc Augé’s book, ‘Non-Place’.
Of course cars are also responsible for another virus, namely Volatile Organic Particles, contributing to 75% of the worlds air pollution. My retort; “We are trashing the natural environment and good husbandry needs to be learnt quickly”. As the professor says; “We have to adapt”.

Ken Taylor is an Artist/ Curator/ Architect who takes a lot of photographs, and is 5 minutes younger than his twin sister .

* Oxford English Dictionary Definition; Association of two different organisms, living attached to each other, or one within the other to their mutual advantage.