Artist / Curator / Architect
Ken graduated from the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow after gaining his undergraduate degree at the Polytechnic of Central London. He worked as a freelance architect in Scotland and London, including Rock Townsend / Ralph Erskine on the “Ark” Office Building in Hammersmith, London, and for London Underground, as a site architect on the Will Alsop designed North Greenwich Station.
In 1998 he bought the ex milk depot at 2c Kings Grove Peckham with sculptor and film maker Julia Manheim. They have since turned this into a live /work studio and home adding three flats to the front of the building. At the beginning of the new millennium Quay 2c was formed as a vehicle for multi disciplinary projects. The practice completed a varying portfolio of projects including a number of housing and mixed use buildings, and became pioneers of the use of solid laminated timber (CLT) structures with the Fairmule House and Chancery Court projects seen below. The Laundry Houses in Peckham, a self developed project of two new 4 bed houses also uses CLT. http://laundryhouses.blogspot.com
Ken taught and lectured extensively in the USA, India, Europe and had a part time lectureship at the Oxford School of Architecture for many years. He also lectured and ran design studios in many other contexts and Universities, was trustee and chair of Artpoint Trust, a Public Arts Commissioning Agency in Oxford and is co-curator and founder of m2 gallery on the front of Quay House in Peckham. He served on LB of Newham’s & extensively on LB Southwark’s Design Review Panels.
From 2016 Ken has been working with Artists Studio Company as a consultant, curating with Julia Manheim and Sarah Goodwin the m2(at)15 anniversary show at APT Gallery in 2018 while developing the 4 x m2 Gallery Pavilion project. He continues to make photographs which have been published as postcard albums yearly since 2014. They can be seen on the links here:
Liminal Landscapes; Plant Free, 2021; Liminal Landscapes; Plant Infused, 2021; Car Quarantine?, 2020; The Outside Coming In, 2020;The Place of Numbers, 2019; How Do You Do’s, 2018; Between Black And White, 2017 (Roll down this page !) Reflections, 2016; Wrap Duets, 2015; Veils and Repetitions, 2014
Past & Future Projects
19th June - 25th July 2021
Future Opening
The show continues to be open Thursday - Saturday 11-5pm until 24th July.
I will be in the gallery all day THIS SATURDAY 10th July . Be great to see anyone who's around.
On FRIDAY July 23rd there will be a later opening from 5-7pm with drinks, when I will also be there.
From 25th July - 10th September the show will continue as a Summer window display only.
Final opening weekend of the full gallery; Saturday & Sunday 11th & 12th September form 11-5pm coinciding with London Open House and Photo London events. Also launching; "Indicum" a box set edition of 10 postcard albums. More info; roll down here www.kenart.space
About the work;
“Events occur without permission”. Jasper Johns; Artist 1979.
Be with a camera, give yourself permission, and events do occur. Photographs become a visual vocabulary of a stream of consciousness. My eye gets drawn to the traces people leave behind. The people aren’t centre stage to my looking. I’m on the stage, in the audience, or sometimes in the wings with them, seduced by the afterglow of their production. The postcards are a digital, analogue hybrid. A present to send back out there, signed by the collaborative authors. They become custodians of the patterns people unknowingly assemble, and abandon on their departure.
The snapshots started to be put in a folder called “Somewhere Between Inside and Outside”. I was probably entranced by Tom Waits singing “Somewhere” as only he can. But then inside and outside got hijacked in the daily narrative of our island, or not, that still persists. Somewhere got lost. The everywhere of landscape became a seductive antidote. The liminal was another, seen through windows, a place on the move between the conscious and the intuitive.
As the Liminal Landscapes folder bulged, it dawned on me that postcard booklets are really albums; a rhythm pal to music; 12 songs, a few words and a cover sleeve. This tuned into seeing the unseen. Half the photos I could see, unbeknown to me, were suddenly infused with plants; so the work is shown as a conversation between the Plant Free and the Plant Infused world. The turn of the century brought forth the Bobo Stenson Trio’s double album, ‘Serenity’, which it is. So, an attempted echo: a postcard double album and an exhibition of prints celebrating the century’s 21st birthday, and of course, music.
Ken Taylor is 5 minutes younger than his twin sister. He is an Artist/Curator/Architect who takes a lot of photographs and co-runs the m2 gallery in Peckham.
All Prints and Postcard Albums are for sale through KENartspace gallery.
Ken at KENartspace……….installation
The Back Catalogue of Yearly Postcard Albums; Each has a sleeve image, some liner notes and 12 Postcards.
2019 Royal Academy Summer Show & Creekside Open
The Place of Numbers; Peckham 52 + New Cross 9.200 = Peckcross 61.200, exhibited in m2 Gallery, at the Creekside Open and RA Summer Shows in 2019
2019 Album Cover
Cover for, L’Aimée de Sappho, the new single of the band Mishaped Pearls. 2019
2019 Baby Beach Hut at Quay House
As an adjunct to the m2 gallery and 4 x m2 Gallery Pavilion of Quay House is what we call the Baby Beach Hut. This was designed in 2019 by Ken as a place for artists to use as an affordable place for creative endeavour. It is modelled on the idea of the shed as a retreat in the garden, but with wi-fi and electrics. Supplementary facilities are shared with the other artist residents of Quay House who occupy the main building. Tucked under a Leyland Cypress tree it has an area of 7m2 an insulated timber framed building, clad in western red cedar boards externally and birch ply internally, creating a light filled oasis.
All photographs Anthony Coleman
2018 Quay2c Architects
Fairmule House Project in book on Cross Laminate Timber Projects in the UK.
Quay2c Architects Fairmule House Project
Between Black & White
September 2017 - January 2018 at Petitou Cafe, Peckham.
This wallet of postcards is a fourth collection of photographs, marking what is becoming a yearly ritual. As a counterpoint to the colour of the “Twin Trilogy” series 2014-2016 and the devisive fall out from the binary choice presented by the EU referendum of 2016, it seemed interesting to investigate colour photos that were ostensibly black and white. In making a preliminary selection and listening to the great bass clarinetist & saxophonist Bennie Maupin’s Penumbra* Cd of 2006, the beauty “between” black and white became the theme and title for the show.
The pictures chosen meditate on a weathered urban world, devoid of direct corporate control, hovering between the recognisable, and something more illusive in their layered complexity. While this, coupled with the black and whiteness can be seen as a lament for a lost communication, the language of photographs is inevitably “light”, the perennial mediator that brings growth, conversations and hope into being. This brought to mind Octavio Paz’s poem “The Bridge”. Here the collaborative complexity to build bridges is used metaphorically to reflect back on making connections, rather than walls of separation. Hopefully the postcards will be sent into the world with affection and some quiet rainbows may appear.
*(Oxford Dictionary definition; Penumbra) 1. The partially shaded outer region of the shadow cast by an opaque object. 2. A peripheral or indeterminate area or group.
Ken Taylor is 5 minutes younger than his twin sister. He is an Architect who takes a lot of photographs and lives in Peckham.
This publication is dedicated to Rosemary Connor Taylor (1933-2016) who had an eye for colour and the nuances Between Black and White.
2015 Light Prototypes
Two Tree Lights ( Photo; Anthony Coleman )
Quay 2c Past Projects
(All Photos By Anthony Coleman)