Participant Details
Jason deCaires Taylor
Born in the UK – 1974
Currently lives and works in the UK

Biography

Jason deCaires Taylor creates underwater worlds. Haunting enigmatic living art installations submerged beneath the waves. He has become one of the first artists to re-conceptualise the underwater realm as a public art space and due to his explorations has been described as the Jacques Cousteau of the art world.

Taylor gained international recognition in 2006 with the installation of the world’s first underwater sculpture park, situated in the West Indies off the coast of Grenada. It was subsequently listed by National Geographic as one of the Top 25 Wonders of the World. Since then, working with local communities, Taylor has gone on to create a network of “Underwater Museums” throughout the world. These publicly accessible artworks are visited by thousands of visitors each week and explore modern themes such as the climate emergency, migration and sustainable futures.  

Using bio-receptive, environmentally sensitive materials that instigate organic growth, the sculptural works evolve, developing new hybrid forms by interacting with marine ecologies. In this way, they regenerate natural habitats and remind us not only of our inherent fragility but also of our connection and intrinsic dependence on nature.

Works Description – Calescent Waters

The Calescent Waters series has recently been added to Jason deCaires Taylor’s studio collection, representing “liquiform coral” that links land based creations to underwater sculptures.

The sculptures have been created to illustrate a union of the controlled and the chaotic. Molten aluminium is poured into tanks of cooling water, forcing the metal to transform organically into an array of geometric shapes and voids. The result is a fusion of the industrial and the natural, echoing the way that coral grows on Taylor’s underwater sculptural creations found across tropical regions. The materials used in this series reflect the artist’s focus on sustainability; the green concrete uses residual industrial materials and the aluminium is recycled.