Jo Taylor’s work begins, always, with attention. It is an attention so sustained and so exacting that it becomes, in itself, a form of knowledge — one that is felt as much as it is seen. A British artist whose practice centres on the animal form, Taylor returns again and again to the question of how to hold within a drawing the power, intelligence and irreducible grace of a living being. Her answer is neither purely analytical nor purely expressive, but a rare and compelling synthesis of the two: drawing that thinks and feels at the same time.
Born in Lancashire in 1969, Taylor studied at Leeds Metropolitan University before undertaking a residency that would prove quietly foundational to her practice. As Artist in Residence at the University of Liverpool’s Department of Veterinary Science, she was granted an unusually intimate encounter with the anatomy of the horse, studying structure not only from the outside, but from within. This experience left a lasting imprint. Beneath the fluency and immediacy of her mark-making lies an anatomist’s understanding — a deep internalisation of form that allows her to move with confidence between precision and freedom. It is this duality that prompted the critic Rachel Campbell-Johnson to draw a comparison with George Stubbs, whose own study of equine anatomy transformed the depiction of the horse in British art.
Yet Taylor’s animals are never reducible to structure alone. Horses, most frequently, but also birds of prey, corvids and cattle, emerge in her work not as subjects of study but as presences: alert, self-contained, and undeniably alive. Her approach is gestural and visceral, grounded in long periods of observation that are distilled into lines of striking clarity and intent. Each drawing carries the trace of time — of looking, waiting, understanding — compressed into moments of decisive action. What remains on the paper is not simply an image, but a kind of encounter. There is, in these works, an almost electric charge: the palpable sense that something living is held within the surface, pressing outward.
This vitality is further amplified by Taylor’s assured use of mixed media. In works that combine watercolour wash with ink and charcoal, she constructs atmospheric fields that are both spare and evocative. Warm ochres, cold cerulean blues, and the muted silvers of winter light create environments that are less descriptive than they are experiential — spaces in which her animals seem to move, to breathe, or to pause in a state of quiet intensity. Importantly, the medium never asserts itself for its own sake. There is nothing decorative here, nothing extraneous. Every mark, every tonal shift, remains in service of the subject, reinforcing the integrity and focus that define her practice.
Taylor’s work is held in museum and private collections internationally, including those of The Jockey Club, The National Horseracing Museum in Newmarket, and The Victoria Gallery & Museum in Liverpool. She has been shortlisted for the New Light Art Prize in 2015 and 2017, and her work has been exhibited at the Royal Academy in London as well as in exhibitions across the United States and Dubai. These achievements, however, feel less like milestones than like natural extensions of a practice that has been, from the outset, deeply committed and singular in its vision.
Life Lines, her first solo exhibition at The Stratford Gallery, brings together a body of work that ranges across subject and medium while maintaining a striking coherence. What unites these works is not only their subject matter, but their underlying ethos: a belief in the expressive potential of line, and in the capacity of drawing to hold — however fleetingly — the essence of a living form. In Taylor’s hands, the line is never merely descriptive. It is an act of connection, a way of thinking through the body and into the life it contains.
