Jacqueline Taylor
Jacqueline Taylor is an artist, writer, researcher and educator. She is the university’s academic lead for researcher development after spending many years leading doctoral education across the Arts, Design and Media. Her teaching specialism lies in art practice research, and she has presented, taught and published widely on the subject both across the UK and abroad.
Jacqueline’s research traverses the fields of painting, art writing and performance. Located at the intersection of aesthetic practice and poetics, her research explores the ways in which non-representational art practices signify and enable meaning-making. Alongside publications in these fields, Jacqueline develops and performs her research in the form of ‘hybrid’ outputs that bring together academic and artistic discourses. She is also a practising artist and has exhibited globally, alongside art writing and other artistic projects.
Current Activity
- Academic Lead for Researcher Development, university-wide
- Material Encounters research cluster co-lead, School of Arts
Areas of Expertise
- Painting
- Non-representation and aesthetic practice
- Art and language, signification, poetics
- Affect, materiality, performativity, encounter
- French post-structuralist theory, notably Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Barthes and Derrida
- Subjectivity, difference and the feminine
- Feminism and postfeminism in art practice
- Practice-led research in the arts
Qualifications
- PhD Fine Art, writing//painting; l’écriture feminine and difference in the making, 2013, Birmingham City University
- PGCE Post-Compulsory Education, 2010, Staffordshire University
- PGCert in Research Practice (Arts, Design & Media), 2010, Birmingham City University
- MA Fine Art, 2007, Birmingham City University
- BA Hons Fine Art, 2005, Coventry University
Memberships
- Society for Artistic Research
- UK Council for Graduate Education
- Vitae
Teaching
- PGCert in Research Practice - Arts, Design & Media
Research
Jacqueline’s research examines the poetic potential of art and the ways that it functions as a signifying practice. She is particularly interested in how we make meaning from non-representational aesthetic practices that do not cohere with or are othered from normative modalities of communication and language. Drawing on the work of French post-structuralist theorists such as Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and Barthes, she is interested in the interrelationship between painting and language, although her research extends to other artforms, and their materialities, including art writing, dance and performance.
Jacqueline’s research also explores theory/practice, writing/making, text/artwork and form/content relations in artistic research and their epistemological dimensions. Her research often deliberately blurs the boundaries between these areas, taking the form of alternative ‘hybrid’ academic and creative forms such as such as paint-sculpt-stallations, text-stallations, book-paintings, performance-texts and painting poems.
Jacqueline’s research also extends to doctoral pedagogies in the arts, with a particular focus on performativity, para-academia and doctoral praxis. She is currently Co-Investigator (Routes Out) for ‘That’s Me!: Eliminating barriers to postgraduate research study in the West Midlands’ (£1.3m, funded by UKRI and the Office for Students).
Postgraduate Supervision
Current PhD supervision:
- Joanna Callaghan - Wild Materialities: Sculptural Form as an Embodiment of Relationship and Knowledge of the Natural World
- Augustus Nweke - Visualising the Unseen: Interrogating the Igbo Cosmic Essence of Shadow through Uli Symbolism
- Mbali Dhlamini - Regenerative Ecologies in practice led research
- Anoushkaa Priyadarshini Kashyap - Sight, Sound and Queer Spaces: An Interdisciplinary Study of Music and Visual Art as Vehicles for Identity
- Wenjuan Lu - The In/Visible Expression of Perception: Self-Portraits in Everyday Moments of Contemporary China
- Yazmin Boyle - Unknowing, becoming and in/betweenness: towards new material space(s) for women* in sculptural art practice.
Completed PhD projects:
- Samuel Underwood - Exploring the music making and performance affordances of ams, a new acoustic modular musical machine, featuring a human agent [Midlands4Cities]
- Harriet Carter - Beyond Transposition? Exploring metaphysicality in birdsong and Olivier Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux through painting practice [Midlands3Cities]
- Rebecca Howson - The Printing Types: A practice-based study of design principles in experimental letterpress.
- Khulod Albugami - Al-Sadu as a Way of Understanding the Sociospatial Practices of Contemporary Art by Saudi Women
- Stuart Mugridge - -Becoming-#Langscape- [fold here] intra-rupting landscape, language and the creative act [Midlands3Cities]
- Sally Bailey - Locating a Space of Exchange: re-imagining the liminal in contemporary painting practice
Publications
Publications:
- Boultwood A. Taylor J. and Vaughan S. “The Importance of Coffee: Peer Mentoring to support PGRs and ECRs in Art & Design.” Vitae Occasional Papers: Research careers and cultures, 2 (2015): 15-20.
- Taylor, J. (Ed) Beyond Borders: Performativities, Articulations and Provocations in Art(s) Research. Routledge, forthcoming.
- Taylor J. “Collisions, Slippages and Getting Lost.” In: Rogers H. (ed) I See What You’re Saying: The Materialisation of Words in Contemporary Art. ARTicle Press, 2013: 31-40.
- Taylor J. Creative, collaborative and growth-oriented: peer mentoring as a space of possibility for doctoral students, Institutional case study, Vitae online resources (2016)
- Taylor J. “Discourses of Dissonance: Enabling sites of praxis and practice amongst Arts, Design & Media doctoral study.” In Breeze M, Costa C. and Taylor Y. (eds) Time and Space in the Neoliberal University: Futures and fractures in higher education. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019: 191-220.
- Taylor J. “From ‘or’ to ‘and’: L’écriture feminine as a methodological approach in Fine Art research.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education: International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 13(3) (2014): 305-313.
- Taylor J. “L’écriture féminine: An Alternative Space In-between.” Desearch: Journal of Art & Contemporary Culture, 1, Spring/Summer (2011).
- Taylor J. ‘Painterly poetics and difference in the making.” In Burchill L. Hill R. and Sares J. (eds) Topologies of Sexual Difference in Philosophy and Art After Irigaray, New York: SUNY Press, 2025.
- Taylor J. “Phoebe Davies: Influences.” This is Tomorrow: Contemporary Art Magazine (2014) [commissioned by Fierce Festival]
- Taylor J. “Research-practice-pedagogy: establishing new topologies of doctoral research in the arts.” In Prior R. (ed) Using Art as Research in Learning and Teaching: Multidisciplinary approaches across the arts. Intellect, 2018: 91-108.
- Taylor J. “Thinking difference differently: an exploration of l’écriture feminine, Women’s Art Practice and Postfeminism.” L’Esprit Créateur: The International Journal of French and Francophone Studies, 58 no. 2 (2018): 41-55.
- Taylor, J. “Sobre colisiones, deslizamientos y sentirse Perdida.” In Post(s), Colegio de Comunicación y Artes Contemporáneas (COCOA), (2017): 94-105. [translated into Spanish from ‘Collisions, Slippages and Getting Lost’, originally published in: Rogers H. (ed) I See What You’re Saying: The Materialisation of Words in Contemporary Art]
- Taylor J. “Subversive Spaces, Embodied Places and Mentoring as Onto-Epistemology.” In Ahmet A. and Trebing D (eds) Mentoring and Communication: Theories and Practices. Peter Lang Publishers, 2021: 227-248.
- Taylor J. and Vaughan S. “A different practice? Professional Identity and Doctoral Education in Art & Design.” In Storey V. A. (ed) International Perspectives on Designing Professional Practice Doctorates: Applying the Critical Friends Approach to the EdD and Beyond. Macmillan, 2016: 127-142.
- Taylor J. and Vaughan S. “The same but different: researching and enhancing PGR employability and experience in Art & Design.” Journal of Educational Innovation, Partnership & Change, 1 no. 1 (2015): 89-105.
- Vaughan, S. and Taylor J. (Eds) “Creative Practice and Doctoral Education” Special Issue Journal for Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies 16 (2) (2025).
Hybrid writing, performance and creative work:
- Taylor, J. (2023) ‘Push-Pull (or Neurodivergent adventures in writing and in-betweenness)’ durational art writing for DX: Diagnosis and Writing curated and edited by Eva Aldea and Gareth Farmer [access here: https://www.dxandwriting.com/push-pull-final]
- Taylor, J. Praxis Para-dox, multi-modal exposition, Research Catalogue (2021) [Access here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1084244/1113527]
- Taylor J. (Editor) Otherlands, multi-modal exposition, Research Catalogue (2020) [Access here: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1000395/1000396]
- ‘Where meaning collapses’, performance-lecture for Imagining the Body in France and the Francophone World, University of Birmingham (2018)
- ‘Bodies-in-process: intersubjective (inter)materialities’, performance-paper as part of The Kristeva Circle, University of Memphis, USA (2015)
- ‘Alchemy of desire: poetic language, jouissance and material practice’, performance-paper for Twice Upon a Time: Alchemy, Magic and the Transubstantiation of the Senses, the Centre for Fine Art Research, Birmingham School of Art (2014)
- ‘Writing making (or making writing)’, performance-paper for Beyond Text: Making and unmaking text across performance practices and theories, Centre for Creative Collaboration, London; AHRC Beyond Text programme in association with University of London (2011)
Selected exhibitions and performances:
- Untold, Platforms festival at the Centre for Culture, Athens, group exhibition co-curated with Jackie Berridge (2017)
- ‘It doesn’t have to be straightforward’, performed with Caroline Horton at InDialogue: an International symposium interrogating how artists and researchers use dialogue in practice, Nottingham Contemporary (2016)
- ‘Rearrangements’, performed with Caroline Horton at Compass Festival Leeds, Leeds Beckett University (2016)
- f generation: feminism, art, progressions, curated by Veronica Caven Aldous, Dr Juliette Peters and Caroline Phillips, George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, Australia (2015)
- Otherlands, two-person exhibition with Georgia MacGuire, University of Memphis, USA (2015)
- Topologies of Sexual Difference, curated by Caroline Phillips, George Paton Gallery, Melbourne, Australia (2014)
Selected conference contributions:
- ‘Disrupting the Doctorate: Building a Postgraduate Research Culture in the Arts’, Researcher Education and Development Scholarship Conference, University of Leeds (online), co-authored with Dr Oliver Carter and Dr Sian Vaughan (2021)
- ‘What the praxis?’ keynote for Practice as research: reconciling action and review, University of Gloucester (2018)
- ‘Dislocated communities? Bringing together researcher developer, PGR and supervisor communities’, UKCGE Annual conference, Bristol, co-authored with S Vaughan (2018)
- ‘A Creatively Critical Collective’,‘A creatively critical collective: establishing an Arts, Design & Media doctoral community’, UKCGE Annual conference, Bristol, co-authored with E Bettison and H Hussain (2018)
- ‘The PGR Studio: provocative pedagogy and other stuff’, PressED Twitter conference (2018)
Find a full list of exhibitions, expositions, performances and publications
Links and Social Media
- Website: Writing Making Space
- Twitter: @JaxterT