Taylor Baldwin

I finally got around to properly documenting this work and posting it on my site, if you want to check the link in my bio. Hunger Stone, 2024 (see material list in comments, poorly formatted) This work starts with cnc carvings of figurative fragments I’ve collected from a public digital archive of anonymized CT scans of people involved in cancer imaging studies. I use a collection of materials found exclusively from various sites of collapse - business closures, residential demolition, industrial failure, prehistoric extinction events, and others - to reconstruct the digitally fragmented body in physical space, and in this case build them a sarcophagus modeled on 14th century transi tombs, also known as cadaver tombs. These were a truly wild funerary sculpture tradition that I don't have space to really describe the history of here. But the most exciting aspect to me is that they represented a moment in history just after massive catastrophe, when the laborers and working people of a highly stratified class society were able to reclaim agency for themselves, from those who had been exploiting them, and coded it in sculpture and stone. This sculpture is made from materials collected almost entirely from the streets, sidewalks, dumpsters, and ocean shores of New York City. These otherwise unvalued components are used reconstruct a portrait of the unknown person on the other side of this digital record, who’s ultimate fate is unknowable outside the brief moment of the scan.

Unnamed Priest with Libation, 2023 A libation is a drink poured out as an offering to the dead. It shows up as a ritual all over different eras and cultures, probably originating in Egypt and moving across the cultures in the Mediterranean world in different forms for the next 3000 years. Wherever this ritual is present in a culture, there are sculptures of figures pouring libations. Hundreds of different religious figures across thousands of years, all performing the same act – a robed figure pouring liquid out in a simple act of sacrifice. I was making a series of objects about people who were close to death in some way and I felt I should make this same sculpture. I found a towel in the road that I cleaned and used for a robe. I found a plastic bottle in a storm drain labelled ‘alcohol’ in sharpie. I used copper tubing I had scrapped from tossed AC units and fridges. A sink I had found from a demolished home. A radiator grill left for me by a scrapper friend. I needed a body to cast parts of the figure, and I used my own without much thought, other than ease. I made an alginate mold of my hands and cast them in tin I smelted from a box of pewter mugs I found in front of a emptied home. I soaked the towel in cement my landlord left in the basement, and draped it over my own shoulder while I held the position of the ancient priest. Weirdly, I decided to do this on my birthday. Serra helped me and it was also her birthday. The cement took a long time to set, and the prolonged weight ended up crushing my shoulder, giving me a deep contusion. I also didn’t know about cement burns at the time, and the skin most in contact with the towel was burned, despite precautions. The whole process was very painful overall, and I now have a fairly large permanent scar. After I finished the work, I realized that it was essentially the only work in a whole series of works about death and the body that featured my body, and only my body. I had essentially (and literally) cast myself as the priest figure, in thinking about the material residue of life and its value during the pandemic. In retrospect, it feels fitting that it left a permanent mark on my body.

Unknown Scavenger, 2023 Air conditioning units and refrigerators are very hard to throw away in New York City. They are full of freon and CFCs, which are pretty heavily regulated. If you want to throw one out in the city, you have to call sanitation to send a technician out to drain the freon, and then tag it with a sticker saying it’s okay to discard. Then you call the city to pick it up off the street. If a unit is found in front of a building without a tag, that building gets a fine, even if it isn’t theirs. Because of these regulations, you will often find discarded fridges and AC units in alleys, empty lots, under the BQE, or other no man’s lands in the city. They are also filled with lots of valuable copper, so are great targets for metal scrapping. For the last four years, I would collect these units and bring them back to the studio to salvage the copper tubing to use in sculpture, after removing the freon from the system myself. Once, I spotted a unit on the street and doubled back to pick it up. By the time I got to it, there was someone else going for it as well. He asked me if I was trying to scrap it too. I told him I was, but that I was trying to use it as material, not for trade in for cash, and that he should take it all. I tried to leave, but he was pretty insistent that I take the parts that he couldn’t use. He really wanted to share it, so we walked to my studio where I had the tools to take it apart. We talked about his family in the Bronx and I told him about the sculpture I was making. He took the clean copper, and I took the steel and radiator fins. I never saw him again, but ever since then I would occasionally find pieces of scrap metal left neatly at my studio doorsteps. They were always from the less scrapable parts of appliances, and I believe they were left by this man who continued to collect scrap in the neighborhood. I never got his name. This work is a portrait of him. It is made from scrap copper that he left and from other appliances left in the neighborhood, as well as a fragment of a plaster skull left out on our block by Miss Cherry Delight, and chewed double mint gum, applied a few pieces a day over the course of 4 years

Write a caption... Partial Body of a Saint, 2021 64in. x 24in. x 18in   All the physical material in this work came from the block my studio was on, and the specific heterogeneous community who lived there. During the early part of the pandemic a woman who lived next door to my studio, Maria, died. She was 95, originally from Romania, and had lived in the neighborhood since she had moved to the United States with her family. When I knew her, she would sit on her stoop and talk with everyone who would pass. She would sit outside for hours, and I think she would feed the neighborhood cats. I always found empty tins of cat food in the planter. We talked most times I came to studio. After she died, I found a some furniture and a box of belonging put out on the street by her family after they cleared her place out. It was filled with the kind of things you would use to fix small things around the house. I cast those things into cement using a found mold; a pair of hollow mannequin legs that the goth TikTok influencer who lived a few doors up the street left out. Once cast, I polished what I could into a sort of DIY terrazzo.   (material list in comments)

Head of a Prophet, 2020 66in. x 18in. x 18in.   (material list in comments)   These works take as their starting point cnc carvings of skulls that I have rendered from a digital archive the NIH makes available to the public of anonymized CT scans from cancer imaging for research. I use a sort of DIY forensic facial reconstruction technique I adapted from an archaeological sculptor who published several how to manuals and videos through the Smithsonian natural history museum. For these reconstructions, I use a collection of materials I’ve gathered from the ends of things - business closures, residential demolition, extinction events, and others. These components I use instead of clay, to take the place of flesh, and to try to reconstruct a portrait of the person on the other side of this digital record, someone who’s ultimate fate is unknowable outside the brief moment of the scan.

I finally documented all of my work from the last 3 years, and have just uploaded it to my site. I’ll post some of the images here as well, but the link is in my bio if you want to see everything, including an new format I have been playing with for a wildly detailed material list. Head of an Elder, 2020 72in. x 24in. x 24in. (material list in the comments if I can fit it?)

I recently finished converting yet another space in a former manufacturing building into a place that I work in, and I want to share some images of it with you. It took be the better part of 9 months. This time more than ever, I’m seeing it as a part of my practice in the same way the work is. I’ve been building a unbroken collection of tools, furniture, materials, fasteners since my very first independent studio in 2007, and they’re all here now. Almost everything is used, reclaimed, or hand built, and I try to leave nothing behind when I move. Doing things this way winds up taking much more time than if I were to buy or new or replace rather than repair. Regardless, I recognize it is a tremendous privilege and luxury to have access to a space like this, and I try to never take it for granted. At any rate, I believe that personal work spaces like this, built and maintained with care and personality and time, are definitely some of the most holy spaces I know of. Here are some images of mine for the next while. (continued in comments)

Here is a small story about small things I’ve been thinking about the last few years: This was a low couple of years. These were years I spent looking at the ground. These were years I spent walking, outdoors, alone and with others. These have been years I spent looking at the sidewalk, at the things people were throwing away in my neighborhood. This was a year I spent collecting every scrap of ‘worthless’ thing I found on the street, large or small, in the places I live and work. During this period this was primarily in New York City, which is the largest and wealthiest city in the country in which I live. I’ve been thinking about why I started doing this, and about why I continued even after my studio was overfull, with coffee tins and repurposed mason jars lining every shelf full of grocery ties and lost earrings and soda pop tops. I think in part, there is an inherent empathy and pathos embedded in something left on the ground, in the evident dismissal. The ground can be a kind of material unifier that way, where if something is there to be claimed, it’s because someone else didn’t care enough about it to bother passing it along. Things that had lost all their value. Or the things that were lost, period. These marginal, overlooked objects might be what actually makes up the bulk of our fossil record, once we’re gone. It feels like the last couple of years have been in part defined by a collective experience of realizing the real value of the things that we had been taking for granted, once they were gone. In what we hadn’t been valuing while things were still good. And also the creeping fear that they might not get that good again. I think these thoughts are connected to why, when I looked at the ground, the sidewalk, and the dirt these last few years, I started seeing all the things that were always there, but I had missed before. (continued in comments)

Here is a long story I have been thinking about for a long time: Over the course of the last year, I’ve been traveling to different sites along the edge of a geologic formation called the Niagara Escarpment. It is an ancient fossilized ocean shore that stretches from just north of New York City, across the state into Canada and north of the Great Lakes before dipping back down to the upper peninsula of Michigan and west into Wisconsin. In parts it lives as an underground vein, and in parts a raised ridge. The Niagara River falling over it forms Niagara Falls. It was formed 420 million years ago, during the Silurian, before even the earliest plants had colonized land, and the continents were barren. Massive blooms of microscopic oceanic life would produce shells of calcium carbonate, and when they died, those shells would rain down in sheets of calcium snow and accumulate on the ocean floor. On land, rain would wash the barren earth away and deposit the minerals in silt at the ocean shore. At this particular shore, the specific minerals mixed with the naturally occurring calcium carbonate and was eventually compressed and fossilized into an arc of dolomitic limestone that describes the coast of this ancient ocean. The place in these photos - the abandoned Widow Jane mine in Rosendale NY - is deep within the subterranean body of the eastern Niagara Escarpment. Throughout the 18th and 19th century, the lime here was dug out, mined, crushed, slaked, and mixed to produce cement. This cement was carted south in wagons by people newly arrived from Europe to be used to make the literal foundations of the economic heart of this new and growing empire. The streets of New York City were made from this material. The base of the Statue of Liberty was made from cement from this mine. The bones of the city built by the wealth of natural resources and people extracted from the interior of this continent were made from the reconstituted skeletons of these tiny bodies. (continued in comments)

HONEST BODIES is opening this Saturday, Feb. 12th at @international___waters at 260 Meserole Street, Brooklyn NY from 1p-8p. It’s a special two-person show with myself and incredible work by @serravictoria about bodies and time and the ceiling and the ground and things that have the least value and entropy and extinction and love and garbage, both current and geologic. If you are in NYC we would love it if you were to swing by the opening reception, Saturday 02/12/2022 from 1pm-8pm at 260 Meserole Street. The show will be up until 03/20/2022.

Alright, here is a rare image of me just to report that I’ve been completely bedogged. I am totally encanined. We have maxed out our capacity for pup. I came here to share these two bad, reckless, irresponsible decisions that I call, from left to right, Charlie and Lucy. Lucy is named in part after my childhood dog Lucas (aka Lukie Pup, who she is a mini version of) and also in part after the first Australopithecus fossil ever discovered. She is definitely a puppy and not at all the grown and disciplined adult we thought she was when we picked her at the shelter. Charlie has taken this last week with her to evolve his position on her from “total indignant rage” to “thinly-veiled disgust”. It is going to take heroic restraint on my part to not just turn this account over completely to corny ass dog content. Thank you for your time, and please address all requests for further dog content to @serravictoria

4 years!!! We now have bachelors degree in each other. Anyone who knows @serravictoria knows I’m the absolute luckiest. This is us 4 years ago standing on the edge of a literal and metaphorical cliff.