Artist, educator, curator and writer Anita Taylor has been making drawings for four decades. Taylor tells me that growing up on a rural farm on the outskirts of the potteries near Stoke-on-Trent 'wasn't luxurious at all, but it was imaginative'.

'We grew up with a huge tradition of drawn decoration,' she went on, and describes finding remnants of pottery and test kilns in the garden and old art annuals left in their home by previous occupants.

Though she studied painting at the Royal College of Art, Taylor considers her charcoal drawings, which explore the female subject, scrutiny, gaze and perspective, the touchstone of her practice. She often works on them for years until they find their resolution.

Parallel to her work as an artist, Taylor has held leadership roles in art schools across the UK and in Australia. Taylor is dedicated to creating spaces for drawing and building supportive, creative communities. She is the founding Director of the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize and Drawing Projects UK. She is also Dean of Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design at the University of Dundee.

Nichol Keene: You've been drawing for over forty years; how has your relationship with it changed and developed over your lifetime?

Anita Taylor: Drawing has always been with me. I quite often say I have drawn my way through my career, but I have actually drawn my way through my life. For me, it was, I guess, a way of understanding my place in the world. It's a private exploration, which becomes public at points; it's a means of seeing who I am and what I'm feeling. It's my imprint.

I began making drawings of myself using mirrors as a student. I don't call them self-portraits, but I have made them periodically throughout my career in different ways. The drawings were a means to inform paintings when they began. But it's become like an extended documentation of change in terms of one's relationship to exteriority, to what you look like, what you feel like, and to the body. Even with all these cameras and selfies, we don't really know what we look like. How do we come to terms with being a living entity that doesn't ever really see itself?

2012, charcoal on paper by Anita Taylor (b. 1961)

Drawing is so immediate, you can pick it up, put it down and come back to it. I have some drawings that have been around the world a couple of times but still haven't found their resolution. I don't work on them every day, but they are always in the studio. I make them in charcoal on heavy-duty watercolour paper, so they take erasure. They are very simple, always just charcoal, burnt wood, willow – carbon, just like we are.

Nichol Keene: After studying painting at the Royal College of Art, you were artist-in-residence at Durham Cathedral. How did your time there impact your work?

Anita Taylor: My experience in Durham was astonishing; it was very levelling, very humbling, very formative. I'd gone straight from Royal College to being a paid artist doing a 12-month residency. It was relatively unusual to do something like that straight from art school. But, I think, it was based on drawing the human expression and thinking about universal narratives with this emotive language.

For me, the role of being a witness or an observer was a very fundamental element of that experience. I took on a unique role there. I was a woman working in the Cathedral, which was male-dominated then. I lived in a female college in the university and worked with lots of local schools. I learned a lot about other disciplines. I'd always been at a specialist art school, and suddenly, I was the only artist in an amazing university where I met astronomers, geologists, medieval historians, Spanish literature specialists, theologians - all sorts of people and experts who feed the work and were probably really formative.

Nichol Keene: You first began teaching as part of that residency, which was very early on in your career. Did your work in education develop alongside your art practice?

Anita Taylor: My career in education maps across everything. There weren't so many women in my time at art school, and it seems really important to be contributing back. After Durham, I applied to go back to Cheltenham, as a fellow. There I really began to think of the theatre of painting – and drawing as theatre.

Then, I moved back to London and started picking up more teaching. I'd leave London on Monday to teach and I'd travel to Sunderland, Newcastle, Sheffield, Nottingham, Birmingham, Cheltenham - I was kind of on a loop around the country. It was becoming a bit unwieldy because I was showing work and giving a lot of myself in lectures and tutorials.

Then, the Head of Painting role came up at Gloucestershire, so I went back to lead that department with the staff that had taught me. I was there for 12 years. It's where I started the drawing prize. I won the Malvern Award for my drawing Seeing Something Else in 1993, and it was given to the Chippenham Museum last year. I wanted that drawing to have a good home because it had been out and about in shows, and it had been so instrumental in everything I'd done.

Nichol Keene: Was winning the award for Seeing Something Else a defining moment in your practice?

Anita Taylor: It was my first accolade for drawing, and it led to the conversation about setting up an open drawing exhibition. It's a critical drawing for me in terms of what it talks about: the nature of looking, observing, seeing, and feeling - the paradoxical relationships we have with ourselves as a female subject.

Nichol Keene: That drawing is comparatively small in relation to your later works. What role does scale play in your work?

Anita Taylor: My drawings have gotten bigger and bigger. My Witness series really plays with the idea of what it is to see and be seen. The scale is critical – in terms of an invitation to be enveloped, to be challenged, to explore – the permission to look closely and to notice. They hold a space, but they are limited by paper. Rolls of paper are made to particular sizes, and I don't want to join the paper because I feel the work needs to be on a unified surface.

Installation image of Anita Taylor's Witness series at the Lines of Site exhibition in 2022 at the H

The scale isn't just about being visible. I've spent 45 years trying to come to terms with my position politically and socially in a canon of contemporary art. Sometimes, it's been enough to be visible because becoming visible for women artists is really critical. I am interested in the nuance between what it is to be visible and what it is to be seen.

Nichol Keene: Nuanced thinking around gender, representation, the gaze, witnessing and being witnessed are consistent in your work; how are these ideas interrogated in Resigned?

Anita Taylor: Resigned is a very large drawing that uses mirrors and the self, really trying to speak to catalytic moments - moments of recognition, of pause, or a moment of action. There is something that runs through it around the sense of a cusp of change, or being seen, being witnessed or being a witness. Alongside that, the idea of noticing is very much about repositioning from the view of a female maker, making figurative and representational images and needing to own that depiction with a sense of agency and power.

I have always been drawn to making figurative imagery because it has the capacity for people to recognise something in them, and then become enveloped and connect to the layers within an image. People are invited by the mark, the scale, colour, and energy – these are not passive characters or protagonists. The works are about taking that space. About re-owning the gaze. The scale is about positioning the intimate, the vulnerable, the frailty of being alive as a power, as a strength. They are often about stripping away what we present to the world and revealing that. And that's why those charcoal drawings of single figures are a touchstone for my practice.

Nichol Keene: Those ideas of representation and frailty are further considered in your recent Moonraker series; how did that series develop? Can you tell us more about the relationship between the drawings and paintings?

Anita Taylor: The Moonraker series is the synthesis of all those particular concerns. The series began with a sense that I wanted to make something larger; I wanted to test something between the charcoal drawings and the relationship with painting and not be limited by the size of the paper. A stretcher gives you much more freedom in size and scale.

2024, ink, oil, oil bar, charcoal on canvas, Anita Taylor (b. 1961)

The first of the Moonraker paintings hung around and hung around. I had to make sense of it, and lockdown gave me space to make connections between all of my works and to find a way to make imagery that is unapologetic.

2024, ink, oil on canvas by Anita Taylor (b. 1961)

One of the paintings is really about suspension. It's about being a witness or an observer; there are different observers within it. It was made during lockdown and alludes to temporary structures and interim sites of care. Thinking about shielding, temporary hospital spaces, the gaps of information.

The paintings really deal with notions of duality. They play with the black and whiteness, with tonality and use the moon, or a representation of it, to give a sense of something that's hidden or in the shadows and then illuminated. We still don't know what happened; we still don't know the level of duplicity that happened during that whole period around Covid. So there is visual doubling; there is a moon and a moon that might just be a gap, a moon that's just not painted, it could be a curtain. There's a sense of water and of suspension.

2024, oil on linen by Anita Taylor (b. 1961)

The moonraker title comes from a sixteenth-century story of people in Wiltshire caught retrieving hidden contraband from a pond by moonlight. They pretended they were raking in the cheese, which was the reflection of the moon, and so were dismissed as buffoons.

There was something about presenting lightly while other things were happening that relates to the whole period around Covid, which is neither literal nor accusatory. It's just that something so extraordinary happened, and we don't really have a sense of what was going on. So the paintings allude to that, and they play with that narrative and think about how we hide things, plotting, observing, witnessing and attempting to capture something illicit. They are very much about being a bystander to human experience. The precarity of that.