Felix Taylor
Felix Taylor is South London based artist working with different audio media to create soundscapes and collages, for radio, installation and film. Felix's work often explores themes of history, comfort and beauty through speech, environmental recordings, sound design and music.
As of this year he has begun to explore audio based programming and procedurally generated audio. Previous work features include; soundscapes for NTS and 1020 radio, exhibition soundtracks at We The Curious museum (Bristol), workshops led at The Arnolfini (Bristol) and performances at The Jewish Museum (London).
[Image courtesy of Felix Taylor]
Searching through the archive for instances of love and care I came across two major themes, food and hair. Both are talked about a lot in oral histories, books and ephemera. I took references from these and used them to replace and refocus bits of old colonial maps I was also looking at.
These images are presented over two videos; one of someone having their hair braided and the other of a stew bubbling away on a stove.
I also had some time to read about Samuel Coleridge Taylor, a classical composer from the 1900s. An image of his is presented in the middle.
The soundtrack is a piece of music I wrote around one of Coleridge's '24 Negro Melodies', 'The Stones Are Very Hard'. The speech you hear is taken from various interviews from the archive (BCA Ref- ORAL/1/4: Interview with Linda Bellos, ORAL/1/3: Interview with Gerlin Bean, ORAL/5: Rudi Patterson).
Felix has been researching our PRINTS, EPHEMERA and AMS collections alongside oral history recordings. For more information about accessing Black Cultural Archives collections, please visit blackculturalarchives.org/collections