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  3. Zoe Taylor

  • Zoe is a London-based freelance illustrator. Her work has appeared internationally in various publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, Dazed and Confused and Le Gun. Zoe recently designed a series of images for the fashion line Marc by Marc Jacobs and she has collaborated on a number of projects with the fashion designer Luella Bartley. Between 2010 and 2012, Zoe illustrated”In the Cut”, a fashion column for AnOther Magazine’s digital platform, anothermag.com.

    Zoe’s major interest is in exploring visual narrative and she is currently working on a series of comics and narrative-based drawings. Zoe’s academic research interests centre around theories of spectacle and the image, experimental narrative and visual narrative.

    Zoe was awarded the Sheila Robinson Prize for Drawing in 2009 and an Oberon Book Award for illustrating Ice by Anna Kavan in 2008.

    Zoe has been a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and at Norwich University College of the Arts. She graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2009.

  • Zoe teaches two second-year modules: Experimental Illustration and Illustration Projects 2. She also supervises on the third-year Final Major Project and dissertations.

    For the Experimental Illustration module, Zoe has developed a series of short projects, each of which requires students to visually think in different ways. The projects explore issues such as representing scientific phenomena, exploring the communicative power of abstract forms, considering mimetic versus abstract approaches to visual interpretations of literature and thinking about the various modes of representing spaces. All of these projects emphasise the importance of composition in creating powerful images. Zoe has also developed a project that invites students to communicate their ideas using sculptural and installation-based approaches to illustration in a public exhibition context. The ultimate aim of the module is to encourage students to develop a personal visual language.

    Within the Illustration Projects 2 module,Zoe has developed projects that draw on her research into sequential narrative, the illustrator as author, the interpretive power of editorial illustration and the potential for screen-based illustration.

  • Current practice-based research includes the development of a series of comics that explore the potential for melodramatic and ambiguous visual narratives and play with comic and cinematic forms. The stories are shaped around ‘interruptions’ of visual spectacle, surface texture and natural phenomena.

    Zoe is developing a series of narrative-based drawings that explore mythic and spectacular iconography such as particular representations of landscapes, interiors, natural phenomena, the universe and imagery associated with cinema, music videos and glamour.

    She is also developing a series of images that relate to a short story by Anna Kavan and reinterpret pop imagery from the 1960s.

    Zoe’s current academic research focuses on theories of the image, spectacle, romanticism, and myth.

  • For publications, projects, datasets, research interests and activities, view Zoe Taylor’s research profile on Pure, the University of Northampton’s Research Explorer.