Mixed-Media Artist
Oceanside, California
01
Mixed media on canvas — cut canvas, nails,
hand-stitching, wire, ribbon
The Mending marks a turning point. After years working as an abstract expressionist painter, this is where the practice broke open — where cutting, stitching, and assembling became as essential as the brush. Sections of painted canvas overlap, curl, and collide across the surface, held together by nails, hand-stitching in both white and black thread, and lengths of taut wire that lace across open gaps like sutures drawn tight over a wound. What reads at a distance as a unified composition reveals itself up close as an act of deliberate, labor-intensive repair — not erasure of damage, but its honest acknowledgment. And in that act of repair, something new became possible.
02
Mixed media — cut canvas, flowers, beads, bamboo,
velvet ribbon, skull charms, hand-inscribed wooden discs
In Vodou tradition, a pwen is a charged object — assembled with specific materials, directed toward a purpose. Built from the dismantled remains of two previous paintings, the canvas fragments form a face — mouth sewn, neck sewn, intentions knotted at the throat. The work borrows that framework to examine the rituals women have long practiced in hopes of affecting healing: in themselves, in the people they love, across generations. The face that emerges is simultaneously portrait and prayer, reliquary and attempt. Whether that intention reaches its destination remains, as it always has, an open question.
03
Large-scale mixed media — cut canvas, copper mesh,
crystals, beading, ribbon, cord, ceramic, transferred drawings
Constructed from fragments of completed, shown works — pieces deliberately cut apart when I understood they were only telling part of the truth. The ruffled, dimensional forms reference both the bodily and the domestic: suture and lace, wound and adornment. Embedded within are small ceramic pieces made over the course of a year — words and phrases that sat waiting until this piece was ready to receive them. Also present are drawings made by my daughter, who has a rare genetic disorder, transferred here as a quiet and permanent presence. This piece comes from inside a caregiving life that has spanned more than twenty years. It is not about that life from a distance. It is made of it.
04
Mixed media — cut canvas, wire, yarn, chain,
copper, beads, skulls, eyes
Built from what was already there. Fragments of two earlier paintings are cut apart and reconstructed on a new ground, threaded through with wire, yarn, chain, and copper. Beads, skulls, and eyes gather throughout — objects that speak to protection, to seeing clearly, to the moments that stay with us. It holds the full texture of a life in motion: confusion and sudden clarity, longing and connection, the tangle of it all. A reliquary traditionally holds what remains of the dead. This one is for the living — for everything still being carried, still unfolding, still here.
A parallel practice in which the surface becomes the garment — painted, inscribed, and worn as both declaration and witness. These works extend the studio into the world, making private weight public and placing language where it cannot be ignored.
Scotti Taylor grew up on a farm outside Houston, Texas, where her earliest education in art came from exceptional public school teachers who recognized something in her early and cultivated it. By high school she was driving across the city every day to attend a prestigious magnet arts program — a commitment that set the tone for a life in which art would always be worth the effort it required.
She went on to study at the University of Texas at Austin, then relocated to San Diego, where she attended The Advertising Arts College and launched a career in graphic design and art direction. That career brought her to the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the world's foremost centers of ocean and earth science, where she served as Art Director — shaping the visual language of serious scientific inquiry and developing a practiced eye for how images carry meaning beyond what words can say.
Then her daughter was born with a rare genetic disorder, and everything changed.
Taylor left her career to become a full-time caregiver — a role she has held for twenty-four years and holds still. Her return to sustained studio practice has produced work that carries all of it: the weight, the complexity, the refusal to look away. Working in acrylic, oil, oil pastel, charcoal, and found material, she builds layered mixed-media works through accumulation and transformation — tearing, stitching, nailing, painting over, beginning again.
Taylor's work explores grief, psychological endurance, and spiritual resilience. Her practice has deepened with age and experience, arriving at a body of work that holds complexity without resolving it, that asks the viewer to bring their own weight to bear.
Her exhibition history includes Pleiades Gallery in Chelsea, Woman Made Gallery and Martha Spak Gallery in New York, ARC Gallery in Chicago, and Nicoleta Gallery in Berlin. In June 2026 she exhibits with the San Diego Museum of Art's Artist Guild.
My work has transitioned into something deeper. Pieces I made years ago are coming back into the studio, pulled apart, painted over, nailed and stitched back together with feelings I didn't have when I first made them. Something that was one thing has become another, and I'm letting that be visible rather than resolved.
I know what it is to hold something fragile over a long time. For twenty-four years I have been a caregiver to my daughter, who lives with a rare genetic disorder. That life does not stay outside the studio door. It is in the work, in the layers, in the decision to return to something already made and remake it with everything I now know. The endurance that caregiving requires, the grief that runs alongside love, the refusal to look away from what is hard — these are not subjects I choose. They are the conditions I work inside.
I build layered mixed-media works through accumulation and transformation. Acrylic, oil, oil pastel, charcoal, found material. I tear and stitch and nail. I paint over what came before without erasing it, because the history of a thing is part of what it is. Earlier works return to the studio not to be corrected but to be deepened, remade with a different emotional weight. The process is visible. The seams show. That is not incidental — it is the point.
I am drawn to thresholds: the moment before coherence arrives, the space where damage has already happened and repair is already underway, the place where the spiritual and the material meet. I work at the edge of what can be held together. My pieces ask what it means to carry something fragile across a long stretch of time and still find a way to make it whole — or at least to make it honest.
There is grief in this work. There is also resilience, and love, and something older than either — a belief that the act of making carries meaning even when meaning is hard to locate. I trust the torn edge, the stitch, the mark made over something older. I trust the accumulation of material to hold what I cannot always name.
What I am after is not explanation. It is the weight of a thing held together by will and material, asking to be felt rather than understood.