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PERSONAL BIO
Welcome friends, art lovers, and fellow grievers!
Thank you for finding me here! My name is Taylor Faye and I currently live in a small, rural town outside of Portland, Maine. My life has taken many twists and turns, which impact the work I do and the art I create. So here’s a little backstory about me.
I was born in Bellingham, Washington in the late 80s and by the time I was 8 had moved across the US twice with my family. My mother being from Western Canada and my father from the northeastern US, we split life and family time on the two coasts of the continent. (I’ve still never lived anywhere in the middle!) My mother was raised in a religious high control group and my father converted shortly after I was born. It was our community, extended family, and the source of our understanding of the world. The contexts of life were skewed and traumas had occurred and occurred that I would not become cognitively aware of until many years later. I dedicated my life to the group symbolically in baptism when I was 14. I was involved in full-time volunteer work from the time I was 16 and was married at 19. After 6 years of marriage our relationship with each other dissolved and so did my relationship to my community, family, and belief system. I left the group to be shunned at the age of 25. I moved to Seattle, WA to begin anew.
Throughout my childhood I always had a keen interest in creativity and making art. I drew, painted, glued; I played piano, clarinet, bass clarinet, and guitar; I danced tap, ballet, hip hop, theater, and pretended to ice skate in socks on the wood floors of our home. I had the opportunity to attend nature camp in Marin County, California, once as a 5th grader and twice as a high school counselor, to attend a summer semester of art classes at the Academy of Art College in San Francisco at 16 years old to study fashion design and interior architecture, and to go on a backpacking trip with a 21 year old friend to Iceland, France, Spain, and Italy at age 17. My creative practice was integrated into my life and showed up in everything I cultivated, manifested, and hoped for.
Once I became “an adult” and got married, my relationship to my creativity was massively altered. The pressures of responsibilities on my shoulders became burdens that made it so hard to carry, there was no space for anything else. During those years I did a lot of collecting and banking of ideas that would hopefully see the light of day “someday”, whenever that would be. I also worked as a nanny for many young families, and taught preschool and outdoor pre-k, which was a fun creative outlet but was more focused on the development of the children than myself. I also taught myself American Sign Language during this time, volunteering as an interpreter for our religious meetings. Another creative outlet, but purposefully applied to focus on the needs and benefit of others, not myself. (I say this not implying that these modalities CAN’T provide satisfaction to the self, but that they didn’t because of the boundaries I had inside of myself at the time. This is another thing I’ve been able to reflect on in hindsight but was hidden to me at the time: I THOUGHT I was feeling fulfilled creatively.)
After my divorce and subsequent discharge from the group that controlled my life, my relationship with my creativity was altered once again. I was still collecting inspiring ideas, but I was focused on watching other people make it happen. I worked my way from bartending in a brewery into production and professionally brewing beer and started studying how people in that field combined technical work and skills with creativity and trained pallets they used like paint to create beautiful, delicate, and bold concoctions that bring people together. I also got very interested in extreme heavy metal music, processing my traumas and inner darkness and disconnection with the music, and learning about the texture of the many ups and downs of life from musicians that had vastly different upbringings than mine. Through these times I wish I had a tape recorder rolling during so many conversations. My memory recall of specifics often fails me, but I’ll never forget how it all made me feel.
In April 2021 I was drugged by a stranger on my birthday, and lived to tell the tale after a harrowing night of chaos and fear, which had a negative impact on my nervous system. Then in December 2021 I was walking at night and someone came up behind me and dealt me a whack to the back of the head, giving me a concussion. Another story of survival, fortunately, but also another figurative hit to my nervous system and a physical hit to my head. It was after this that I felt compelled to return to my art practice in a literal way. I found an unused rubber block carving set buried in a box in the back of the closet, googled the words “stages of grief”, and began carving images to the 7 that popped up. I cut them out, created a back design, wrote a guidesheet, hand-sewed a bag, and started selling them at craft markets so I could teach myself how to tell my grief story. I found out quickly that setting up with the words “GRIEF” on a table in a public space gave others a sanctioned place to tell their grief story too. Over the years I have added to this project, adapted it, made changes to it… but I still stand at local markets when I can, waiting to listen to anyone who needs someone to bear witness to their pain.
After the assault incident in Seattle, I tried rebuilding my life, but was struggling with carrying the compounded grief that I held inside my body. With the help of many incredible and generous friends, I found my way into owning a car and driving it and a carefully-curated selection of my belongings and set off across the country. I left Seattle with $200 in my pocket, slept in my car, stayed with friends, and delivered for UberEats along the way to pay for gas money. I landed in New York for 7 months living-in with an incredible 95 year old woman before relocating to Southern Maine to live on a farm and brew beer again. Over two years later I am still in Maine, making art, and taking life one moment at a time. I also volunteer with the Center for Grieving Children as a Grief Group Facilitator, which has given me invaluable community and a safe and supportive home base for my wanderlustful grief story.
Thank you so much for taking the time to visit this page and to read a little about me and my background! Feel free to reach out if you’re interested in collaborating, an art commission, or if you have a grief story that needs to be heard. You can contact me by email at taylor@taylorfaye.com.
Cheers!
Taylor Faye
Moth+Moon Community
MISSION STATEMENT
MISSION STATEMENT
My mission is to speak through my art from what is true no matter how uncomfortable, to transmute my lived experiences and subsequent grief into creative expression, and to support others on their journey to do the same. I intend to create imagery and systems that reflect my values and belief in personal autonomy and sovereignty. My hope is that my work resonates with the hearts and minds of others in and out of my community experiencing the textures of grief and loss that life naturally offers.
ARTIST STATEMENT
ARTIST STATEMENT
I am a queer, self-taught artist and grief worker. I have walked a meandering path to arrive in the current moment and I expect to continue encountering a variety of places and spaces through the course of my life. I began in a close-knit conservative family deeply indoctrinated in a religious cult. My upbringing shaped my perspective, as leaving reshaped it, and since then my frame of reference continues to tumble and flow through cycles. As a lover of systems and chaos alike, I find that this suits me well and continually repopulates my creative wellspring, which I pull from my creative practices.
I prefer to create images in ink and print most of all, often topically focusing on the experience of grief and loss. I incorporate the images into practical tools such as card decks, zines, patches, and textile items for the home. I also have a background in graphite, pen and ink, acrylic paint, and a long relationship with the culinary and fermentation worlds. Loving cooking was a gift from my mother, and appreciating the scientific method was a gift from my father, and I like to think that I put the two together by becoming a professional beer brewer. Making something I love for a living has been brutal, complicated, and rewarding, but nothing in my life has rivaled the pleasure of making anything just for the sake of wanting to. I think that has been my anchor in some of my darkest nights and stormiest waters.
I find flow carving away rubber block negative space around my pencil lines detailing something I’ve photographed, and seeing the first print bring the new and unique perspective of an image to life. I also find meaning in saving up items that in the past I would have discarded without thought. Now I see opportunities to create and recreate beautiful and meaningful things in every corner of my life. I find paper to be a very satisfying medium and I enjoy the process of making old paper into new paper or into paper clay that I hand-build around forms to transform trash into haunting human-like figures. Shaping them releases my trapped inner demons, quelling their intimidating power. I find the same to be true of the written word, which I tend to approach with reflective observations and occasionally generative poetry.
Because of my background and the choices I’ve made, I often gravitate towards topics that focus on high control, specifically in religious or group dynamics. I also enjoy exploring the sciences, especially biology, ecology, physics and fluid mechanics, chemistry, food and fermentation, and evolutionary theories. On the darker side, however, I also find myself deeply interested in and inspired by the doom and gloom of grief studies and death in art and cultural practices. The nature of taboo deaths and the psychology of suicide, religious artwork, especially Baroque artwork in Portugal, memory trauma including TBIs and dementia, and the nature of war and our oppositional relationship with our earth expressed in extreme music and culture in Northern European and Cascadian Black Metal music are particular inspirations and fastenations that consistently sneak their way into my art.
In my work I hope to primarily challenge how we conceptualize death and grief and the very natural role they play in our lives that many of us have denied. Because of the challenges in my background I desire to cast a knowing shadow from a well-built beacon of hope, exposing what lurks in the shadows and naming abusers clearly so they are unable to escape accountability. High control groups aim to weaponize our greatest attributes against us and the trauma is indelible. So will be my art in its unwavering willingness to speak to the truth, call out abuse, and create refuge through tools for critical thinking and self-knowledge, the biggest threats to anyone trying to control another person. I am motivated and inspired by connection, creativity, ritual and storytelling, change, transition, evolution, and TIME to meander toward whatever lures me forward. I also could not do what I love without being inspired by other artists who aren’t just incredibly talented and intelligent, but are also exemplary and kind humans in their everyday lives. And what could be more inspiring than seeing someone you adore make something incredible??