Sam Taylor-Wood

After graduating in 1990 from Goldsmith's College in London, Sam Taylor-Wood (London, 1967) devoted herself initially to sculpture.
While working for the Royal Opera House she became interested in the cinema as a medium for the direct observation of everyday life.

She began to make films, using different formats in various different situations, in which her attention was focused on the isolation of human emotions.
In 1994 she had the first solo exhibition of her works, becoming part of what has been called the "Freeze" generation and making a notable impact on the international art scene due to the radical and transgressive spirit for which she is noted. Her work has been described as an "art-film hybrid", because it comprises aspects of photography, film, video, video-installation and sound. Regarding the aims and meaning of her work, the artist states: "I'm interested in recording crude human emotions and then isolating them without any narrative structure.
In order to obtain this, I try to free myself of the narrative conventions that are used in a typical feature film. For example, if you're watching a quarrel at the cinema, you want to see where the argument began because it develops gradually. I'm much more interested in showing the individual form of that argument - its basis and emotional content"." The recurring themes in her work are unease, solitude, provocation, euphoria, aggressiveness and sexuality.
From 1995 onwards the artist produced a series of photographs entitled Five Revolutionary Seconds; each of these is composed of a sequence of images containing numerous figures, like the scenario of a mysterious story. The only aid to the interpretation of this is provided by the soundtrack with the voices, the poses of the actors and the interiors in which they are located.