Jason deCaires Taylor

Few artists take their creative partnership with water to the dramatic depths achieved by the works of Jason deCaires Taylor. In direct contradiction to the understanding of a work of art as an immutable creation that belongs in a carefully controlled environment behind glass barriers and velvet ropes in a museum, deCaires Taylor chooses to sculpt works destined to be not only altered but transfigured and even brought to life by ocean currents and sea life. His museums are located on sea beds and ocean floors, living testaments to the ephemeral passage of the human race. His works span the globe; his work contains multitudes.

Irreducible to any single theme or approach, deCaires Taylor engages with the complexity of local communities at each port, using individual inhabitants as models for his creations of universal import. Constantly innovative, his artistic practice attests to his unbridled curiosity to keep pushing the boundaries of how art, science, geopolitics, and marine life can work together to bring beauty and prosperity while protecting fragile eco-systems (often by deflecting tourists from coral reefs in need of regeneration). Many of his works double as hatcheries, supports, or shelters for marine life as well as indicators of ocean temperatures, radically reinventing what it means to be an artist of the Anthropocene.

Jason deCaires Taylor has achieved the status of a sculptor whose works everyone has seen whether or not they recognize his name, whose creations precede him, sometimes eclipse him, and attest to his visionary generosity. He has become an artist par excellence, the referential master of an entire genre.  – A. Street