Mayson Taylor — Apophatic Art Practice and Research

16 SHOWINGS Toward a Feminist Apophatic Art Practice

This practice-based research project develops paper weaving as a feminist apophatic methodology through the material interlacing of two visionary texts: the Book of Revelation and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love. It produces a series of sixteen woven works that explore how meaning emerges, fractures, and reconstitutes itself when canonical language is reconfigured through embodied making.

The project positions the Book of Revelation as a foundational text in Western apocalyptic imagination, one that has shaped enduring languages of crisis and which tends toward totalising closure of history and meaning. In contrast, Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love is approached as a sustained practice of non-closure: a recursive return to sixteen “showings” across two versions of her text, where understanding deepens without resolution. Rather than opposing these texts, the project works within their tension: excess and restraint, catastrophe and interiority, finality and ongoing revelation.

Methodologically, paper weaving is used to bring these texts into direct material contact. Passages are cut into strips of varying scale and interlaced so that language shifts between legibility and dissolution. Meaning is disrupted through the act of cutting, while reassembled in unstable configurations through weaving. What is obscured remains structurally present; visibility and concealment become mutually constitutive. Weaving is understood as historically gendered labour and as a contemplative practice, through which epistemic authority is redistributed into material process.

The project draws on feminist approaches to ineffability in mystical writing and concepts of erotohistoriography, where voice and its limits are inseparable. Julian’s writing is read as knowledge formed from within constraint through her enclosure. The research asks what kinds of artistic methodology emerge when closure is refused, and how apophatic thought can be materially enacted. In doing so, it frames weaving as a method for thinking through fragmentation, saturation, and the unstable production of meaning.

Mayson Taylor is an artist, weaver, whose practice spans collage, textile work, writing, and research. Her work centres on weaving as a vehicle for translation and as an alternative epistemic system for knowledge-making. She is interested in epistemology and in the politics of how knowledge is formed, asking how, and by what means, something or someone becomes known, particularly in relation to marginalised ways of knowing.

Her background is in philosophy, where she researched female mystics and philosophically examined relationships between power and knowledge, particularly how women have used language to articulate spiritual authority within constrained contexts. This continues to inform her artistic practice, which considers embodied knowledge, the limits of representation, and tensions between what can be spoken and what remains unsayable.

Her writing includes forthcoming publications in Guava magazine, where her poetry engages multiplicity and unrealised life paths, and an autoethnographic work in press that reflects on voice and the relationship between bodily tension and expression.