Sam Taylor-Wood

Sam Taylor-Wood (born 1967, London) is a British artist whose practice spans photography, film and video. Emerging in the early 1990s and closely associated with the YBA generation, Taylor-Wood developed a body of work that engages with vulnerability, endurance, grief and the performance of emotion — often through the medium of the extended photographic sequence or the single-channel video.

Her panoramic photographs — including the Five Revolutionary Seconds series, in which a 360-degree camera traces the interior of a room and its occupants in a single continuous image — compress time and space into a format that is simultaneously documentary and theatrical. Her video works, including Crying Men and Pietà, place their subjects in states of extreme emotional exposure, holding the camera on them with a stillness that is both compassionate and forensic.

Taylor-Wood has exhibited with White Cube in London and has been the subject of major retrospectives internationally. Publications produced in connection with her practice — catalogues, monographs, and printed matter — document a body of work that has remained consistently attentive to the body under pressure.

  • Package Holiday: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection, The Hydra Workshop, Hydra, 1997. Front cover: solid bright blue card with "PACKAGE HOLIDAY" in large black bold type lower left; 15 artist names in three rows of small white text below — Don Brown, Peter Doig, Tracey Emin, Angus Fairhurst, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson, Georgina Starr, Sam Taylor-Wood, Nicola Tyson, Gillian Wearing. Landscape format, 21 × 15 cm. Light handling cr Package Holiday, Hydra Workshop, 1997. Interior spread: left, full-bleed colour photograph of Hydra harbour and hillside town — whitewashed cubic buildings descending to the water, blue sky and sea; right, white page with "PACKAGE HOLIDAY" heading in bold blue type, two paragraphs of exhibition text, and black silhouette of three stacked suitcases lower centre.

    PACKAGE HOLIDAY: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection. Hydra Workshop, 1997

    PACKAGE HOLIDAY: New British Art in the Ophiuchus Collection. Hydra Workshop, 1997