Charlotte Taylor Blurs the Lines Between Fiction and Reality in Architectural Design

18 Oct

THE BRITISH ARTIST TALKS DELLOSTUDIO AND WHY SHE PREFERS TO COLLABORATE ON WORKS

If we could, we’d like to live in British artist Charlotte Taylor’s imaginative world for awhile. The London-based digital designer has developed a captivating style of pastel-hued worlds where the lines between fiction and reality are blurred to perfection. Through years of personal projects and commercial projects for big-name clients including Elle Netherlands and Print Club London, Taylor has forged her own path in pushing the boundaries of design and architecture to create works entirely unique. But to Taylor, she’s never done learning, and she’s always looking for ways to challenge herself and her approach to art. We caught up with Taylor to learn why she’s loving collaborative projects at the moment and what’s next for her career.

VISUAL PLEASURE: Tell us more about your background. Have you always been drawn to creating? What first sparked an interest in art for you?

Charlotte Taylor: I was born and raised in London to a creative family; my father is a lighting designer and my mother is a lover of interiors and art. My style is something between my fathers’ technical architectural drawings and my mothers’ expressive painted creations. I have held a curiosity for architecture and creation from a young age, obsessively building entire towns from Lego and constructing scaffolding towers in the garden while my parents were out.

VISUAL PLEASURE: In addition to your personal business, you’re also one half of dellostudio. How did dello studio come about and how does the architectural design work created there affect your personal projects?

Charlotte Taylor: dellostudio is an interdisciplinary duo with my friend Oscar Piccolo. It began rather by chance, sitting next to each at Chelsea, where we quickly realized we shared a connection in our thinking and slightly warped architectural views. We both have our personal ventures outside of dello. On my side, it helps me to approach projects with more of a 3D understanding and process, I find the interplay between 3D and 2D integral to my work.

VISUAL PLEASURE: Where do you draw inspiration from? Who or what inspires you and how has that changed over your career?

Charlotte Taylor: Space is my main source of inspiration, predominantly from visiting architecture and its depiction through books and magazines. I am also very curious about architectural photography, I find great interest in other peoples’ works to see how they experience and capture the space. This has evolved in how I interpret such references and inspiration. As a high school student I was equally intrigued by buildings and would meticulously draw them detail by detail. Now, I am interested in the peculiarities of space and have a less literal relationship between my work and influences.

VISUAL PLEASURE:You have a lot of experience in editorial commissions. Talk to us about the difference between creating work for yourself and creating work for someone else.

Charlotte Taylor: Creating personal work is very freeing, but it’s also very easy to let the idea fade away—a number of projects will be works-in-progress for years! Working under client pressure forces me to articulate the work to a greater and quicker extent, which can be good or bad. On the whole, I really enjoy working to a brief with another creative input, it challenges my work to be pushed into new and unexpected directions. I try to always stay true to my style with editorial work, sneaking a sphere or arch in somewhere!

VISUAL PLEASURE: Has social media had any impact on you as an artist or affected your work or creative process?

Charlotte Taylor: Social media has been the basis for almost all of my commission work, I think it is a great tool to showcase my work and it makes it easier to reach out to other creatives and potential clients. I have worked on a lot of collaborative projects with other render artists via Instagram, it is a brilliant way to connect with like-minded artists and create something together.

VISUAL PLEASURE: What have been some standout projects for you?

Charlotte Taylor: My recent ongoing collaboration with Stefano Giacomello is a project that is really exciting for me; to conceive a fictive space together and then style the interior and furnishings for said imagined home. Working with Stefano in this back-and-forth conversational manner is a really inspiring process as he’s always interpreting things in unexpected but brilliant ways, the final images aren’t anything I had in mind initially, but through such a process of both of our creative inputs, something completely new emerges. Collaborative work is something I really thrive in and it’s becoming a large body of my recent work.

VISUAL PLEASURE: Do you prefer one medium over another? Illustrating over architectural interior design work?

Charlotte Taylor:They definitely go hand-in-hand with each other, however, architectural interior design work will always be more of an interest to me, as illustration appears to be more of a thinking and research process towards this. I am very attracted to the physicality and fabric of space, something I would be entirely frustrated with working in digital or print.

VISUAL PLEASURE: What are some upcoming projects that are exciting you? What would you like to do next?

Charlotte Taylor: With my personal practice and my studio partner at Dello, there are some really intriguing projects coming up this summer, shifting the focus more to interiors and furniture. With Dello we will be showing a prototype collection during London Design Week for Laura Fulmine’s new gallery space, M.A.H., and are currently working on a number of private interiors. This shift toward interiors is definitely a direction I would like to continue and eventually, transition even more into architecture.