Fraser Taylor is an interdisciplinary artist based in Glasgow. He studied painting at Glasgow School of Art and printmaking at Royal College of Art in London in the 1980s before establishing the internationally acclaimed textile company The Cloth. He was Adjunct Professor of Textile Art at the Institute of Art in Chicago before moving back to Scotland in 2017.
Between 2013 and 2014 he spent several months in The Booth (Scalloway) and found himself inspired by Shetland's largely treeless landscape, the shapes of the myriad small islands, black rock strata, and the shifting colours and light. He was also moved by John J. Graham's 1987 novel Shadowed Valley, which tells the harrowing tale of one family in Weisdale and how they and their extended community's lives were decimated by the evictions and land clearances of the nineteenth century.
This series of suspended textile works currently on display in the Upper Cafe Bar at Mareel was created for Fraser's exhibition Shadowed Valley, at Bonhoga Gallery in 2015 after which it was gifted to Shetland Arts.
