Image by Dawn Surratt.
bio
Maine-based photographic artist and writer Sal Taylor Kydd uses various photographic media in a personal narrative that explores themes around memory and belonging; combining her poetry with alternative processes of photography and object-making.
Taylor Kydd’s fine art photographs have been exhibited throughout the country and internationally, including Barcelona, San Miguel De Allende, Portland, Boston and Los Angeles; and she has been featured in numerous publications, including Shots Magazine, Don’t Take Pictures Magazine, Lenscratch, Diffusion Annual and The Hand magazine.
She has self-published a number of books combining her poetry with her photographs. Her books are in private and museum collections throughout the country including The Getty Museum, Bowdoin College, The Peabody Essex Museum and the Maine Women Writer’s Collection at the University of New England. Taylor Kydd’s latest book “Yesterday”, produced by Datz Press, is a limited edition book of poems and photographs that explores our sense of loss around the pandemic of 2020.
Taylor Kydd is also a veteran workshop leader and educator and has led workshops and conducted portfolio reviews throughout the country and internationally with Maine Media, Santa Fe Workshops, Palm Beach Photography and Nord Photography in Norway.
Originally from the UK, Taylor Kydd is fluent in French and Italian, having earned her BA in Modern Languages from Manchester University in the UK. She has an MFA in Photography from Maine Media College in Rockport, where she now lives with her husband and two children.
artist statement
My work draws strongly on the landscape, focusing on my home, family and myself in conversation with the natural world. I am often attracted to the objects and artifacts that we surround ourselves with, as memory-laden emblems of our history and signifiers of the passing of time; how our sense of place is embedded with personal history.
I focus on the photographic object, print, or artist book, as keepsakes of my experience. Photographing gives me a way to capture my impressions, whilst writing and making books and objects lets me distill and re-examine that experience. The art of making provides me with a tangible and tactile way of understanding and reframing my memories in a new narrative.
I work in a variety of media and am especially drawn to assemblage work and alternative processes where the hand of the artist plays a strong role. Working in photopolymer gravure and platinum palladium gives my prints an aesthetic that speaks to the echo of memory, in a work that cements fleeting impressions in the here and now.