Zin Taylor: Lavender Glass

Zin Taylor’s (born 1978) Lavender Glass explores how the subjects of growth and formation develop into a series of conceptual forms surfacing through investigative elements of inquiry, exchange and abstraction. Copublished with the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge, the monograph gathers nearly a decade of the Canadian artist’s multifaceted narrative work across sculpture, installation, artist’s books, and writing. A text by Belgian curator and writer Dieter Roelstraete serves as a contextual introduction to a five-day conversation between Roelstraete and Taylor that took place while both were in Chicago. The meandering discussion explores the trail of influence between a work’s concept, the language it develops, and the form it produces, as well as the individual pieces or concepts involved; associative links to cooking, music, botany, stones, and the city of Brussels arise along the way. The Belgian graphic designer Boy Vereecken, together with Antoine Begon, developed a sensitive design for the publication, integrating images of Taylor’s work into the elongated conversation. The layout functions not only to illustrate the subjects as they are discussed, sometimes literally and other times editorially, but to reflect Taylor’s interest in how ideas have a way of developing into visual form as they unfold over a duration–or a discussion.