Taylor Finke

Taylor Finke is a Tampa-based artist whose work often explores personal narrative in relation to family, identity, femininity, and the domestic space. She is a recent graduate of the University of South Florida, where she studied photography and psychology. Taylor has exhibited nationally and is a recent recipient of the 2016 Society of Photographic Education’s Southeast Region Award.

Artist Statment: Harsh Words From Our Mothers

I am a woman raised by women. In this body of work, I retrace and reconstruct my family history—about which I know very little—through fabricated images, family photographs, and found documents with a focus on matriarchal lineage and female identity. The images I make reference traditional versions of femininity and womanhood that I was taught by my mother and grandmother while often also challenging them and creating feelings of tension. From one image to the next, I investigate my past alongside my present relationship with my mother, and how these things have affected my own understandings of womanhood, motherhood, and relationships.

The images are created entirely in my mother’s home, alluding to the confines of the domestic space. The series moves back and forth, combining still lives drawn from memories that reference themes of femininity and domesticity with altered family photographs. These family photographs depict my female relatives, many of whom I never knew. I also utilize documents that, in particular, have some significant relationship to my own personal history. These images and documents come together to construct a visual family history that functions not simply as documentation, but also as a piecing together of things that I know, things that I think I know, and things that might remain a mystery to me.