Spirit in the sky

11 April 2012

Second only to Tracey Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood is the most recognisable of the BritArt generation. She smiles out from newspapers and magazines, pictured with celebrity friends at glitzy gallery dos alongside her dealer husband, White Cube's Jay Jopling.

Her high profile, as much as her films and photographs that feature celebrities such as Marianne Faithfull, Kate Moss, Ray Winstone and Kylie, has skewed her reputation as a serious artist.

Yet she may be the youngest ever to enjoy a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery (last year, aged 35) and is more respected abroad than many of her British contemporaries. Tonight, at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, she premieres two short films that might, finally, bring her the recognition she deserves as one of our greatest imagists, and perhaps our sincerest romantic.

I first met Sam when she was graduating from Goldsmiths in 1991. Finishing a couple of years earlier and exploding on to London's art scene with their Frieze exhibition, Damien Hirst and Gary Hume had already drawn attention to the college's extraordinary output, but Taylor-Wood was perhaps the first to confirm that a movement (of sorts), rather than a handful of talented individuals, was emerging.

Her then partner, Jake Chapman, came out of the Royal College in the same year, along with Gavin Turk; all are now part of the powerful White Cube stable. Even today, Taylor-Wood cannot get over the scale of success that she and her peers enjoyed. "What was that thing that happened?" she exclaims.

We talk after her two-hour morning yoga session - "I can't live without it" - and I cannot help thinking of this discipline as a consequence of her battle with breast cancer over the past few years. She seems well, but confesses to being "constantly tired. I take on too much, and try to accomplish everything". As well as running her studio full-time, she devotes herself to her six-year-old daughter, Angelica.

In her self-portraits, the allusions to her illness are poignant. In the bleak Self Portrait as a Tree her sense of isolation is obvious, and in Single Breasted, while alluding to the jacket she is wearing in the image, the wilful pun is evident. "I use the self-portraits as a way of checking in with myself," she admits. "Having come through cancer, those two photographs were a response to people asking, 'What will you do now?'"

The two new films, Strings (nine minutes 28 seconds) and Ascension (four minutes 15 seconds), are more obliquely referential, suggesting an ethereal state, contemplative, tentative and restrained - a far cry from the domestic angst of earlier videos such as the five-screen, five-character Pent-Up or Travesty of a Mockery, which scrutinises a kitchen-sink row.

"The new pieces are always going to be autobiographical in some way. There is an element of our mortality in them - I'm much more aware of that than I was."

In Strings, a string quartet plays plaintive Tchaikovsky while Ivan Putrov, principal dancer with the Royal Ballet, is suspended above them by wires. He dances gracefully, in slow motion, responding to the players beneath him, at times seeming even to conduct them in their playing.

But consistent with all of Taylor-Wood's films is a palpable distance between protagonists, even at the moment of complex interaction. "The dancer is trapped in a netherworld and can't break through," she says. The theme connects with her earlier work, such as her photographic series, Five Revolutionary Seconds - extended images taken by a camera rotating through 360 degrees around a room - which she describes as: "Rooms full of people who weren't communicating."

Ascension presents a peculiar tableau - a tap-dancer dances over a motionless body, with a dove resting on his head. The Christian iconography is there again, but tempered by a tragic-comic, near-Renaissance ritual.

"I'm not a religious person," claims Taylor-Wood. "The work seems to come from my relationship to art history." The four-minute sequence ends when the bird flies away of its own accord - like the spirit, or Holy Spirit, leaving the body. It seems to have surprised her.

"I sat down and drew it, and it wasn't until I watched it several months later that I saw why I'd made it. I look at it and recognise it as something that's part of me. I always feel when I'm making my work that it's three to five steps ahead of me."

In her Pieta, of 2001, Taylor-Wood holds an inanimate Robert Downey Jr in her arms in an almost still tableau of mute pathos. Again, the viewer is tempted to read the actor's personal troubles with drugs into the scene. But it is one of the most touching video works of the past few years and signals a spiritual dimension in her work. The idea for the piece emerged at the end of their collaboration on Elton John's I Want Love video.

It is a simple, intuitive gesture that informs an almost still piece lasting only a few seconds. "I said to him, 'Give me your full weight,'" which, as a director's instruction, she surely meant both physically and metaphorically. "It felt important for me to support him through the role. It's an added extra for me that both of us were going through major events in our life," she explains. "Knowing his baggage adds a dimension."

It is hard to categorise Taylor-Wood. Her images and vignettes owe more to classical painting than the pop sensibilities of her YBA peers. The work is arresting, never abstract, always rooted in human relationships, but it resists the literal interpretations we try to impose on it. Taylor-Wood makes an art that, in her words, "adopts the language of film, where there is a shift away from narrative into something else".

She draws on others' expertise to achieve impactful images. Seamus McGarvey, for example, in conversation with her tonight at the ICA, has been her long-time cinematographer, and has recently enjoyed personal success for his work on Stephen Daldry's film The Hours.

She has not yet made a full-length feature film, but hints that there are "some ideas in the pipeline". She is in no rush. For now, Taylor-Wood is relishing creative freedom.

Her new films are the result of a year working "with no agenda and no plans to show". After years of working solidly towards exhibitions, it was important for her to evolve projects that she could "live with a bit, rather than have them shipped off to America as soon as they were done".

The miniature gems that will be seen for the first time this evening bear the hallmarks of a mature vision; their meaning will take much longer than a few moments in the cinema to unfold.

Sam Taylor-Wood is in conversation with Seamus McGarvey at the ICA tonight, following a screening of the new films. Information: 020 7930 3647.

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