About

Shefon N. Taylor, Interdisciplinary Artist and Writer

My practice begins with fragments. Through works on paper and experimental sculpture, I build collage forms that confront nostalgia and the illusion of wholeness, holding space instead for rupture and what lingers in its aftermath.

Holding the fragment as inquiry reveals absence as a site of meaning. The public and familial archives I draw from emerge as distorted ground, where inaccuracy and omission shape what is known. Rather than repairing or reimagining history, my work engages a methodology I call archival abstraction — a way of working that treats the fragment as evidence of what resists legibility.

Each tear, cut, and stitch is a form of intervention. Archival imagery, thread, and wire register rupture differently: they fray, they bind, they strain. In doing so, they alter the presence of absence and ask how it is felt and carried forward.

This refusal also guides how I navigate selfhood, confronting the weight of visibility, femininity, and the legacies of Black womanhood. My work negotiates presence without collapsing into spectacle, insisting that refusal is a form of care and that illegibility to the wrong gaze is a form of liberation.

I am extending this practice into sculptural forms, textile installations, and moving image, pursuing collage not only as medium but as methodology — an evolving language of archival abstraction that reshapes environments and opens new conditions for seeing and being.