A period of searching was catalyzed by personal tragedy, the loss of her brother. This eventually led Taggart to turn from painting, her primary medium, back to drawing in the early 1990’s. At first these dark works held what she called “primal images”—rounded, indistinct forms. But over several years, more recognizable images emerged in the thickly worked charcoal, all of them stark, strongly drawn and unapologetically frontal: a series of skeletal birds, their wings pressing right to the edge of the paper; naked figures; many self-portraits, staring out in huge closeup.

Taggart identifies one tall, thin work on paper Poor Little Flutter, (1994) as marking her transition to the clearer imagery. In format, it is like a vertical diptych: below, a serpent-like form, coiling light and dark together in the surrounding blackness; up above, a lightly-drawn bird lifting off in a patch of light. Could we read this as a before-and-after parable, announcing the emergence of her images from their hidden, chthonic embrace into the light of visibility?

Her mural-sized, 14-foot long drawing Genesis, (1999) offers a culmination of these explorations in an exuberant profusion of imagery. While the relatively smaller drawings are pushed along with strongly curving, gestural lines, this piece practically explodes with movement, its upright birds and turtle-figure streaming off to the left from a central “big bang,” a giant bird-foot seemingly thrown out of the vortex, and smaller, egg-and-sperm forms swimming in linked vortex spirals to the right. No equivocating here, the images and the energy of their execution shout their engagement with questions of death and rebirth.

She’s travelled far since the time when, as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, she willingly immersed herself in abstract expressionism, notably the work of Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock. Already working large then, she was deeply affected by Anselm Kiefer’s exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1988: Kiefer’s heavily built-up surfaces, his ambitious scale, and, I would guess, his passionate integration of recognizable visual content with abstract presence, seemed to show her a path forward. Later, in the Academy’s Masters of Fine Arts program, Taggart took in much from the work and approach of critic and mentor Mary Frank.

Her return to painting meant, in many cases, returning to older paintings, using them as “found objects” with which to begin new work. Within these paintings, the imagery—birds, wings, birds’ feet, hands and fish—is readable but far more discreet within the whole than it is in the drawings.

This may be partly because the paintings’ surfaces have so much to say already. Worked up from a base of acrylic to areas of oil and encaustic, abandoned and revised, encrusted, then scratched and even cut away, their surfaces are dense with the eloquence of age, and the character gained from literal acts of renewal.

In the horizontal diptych BLUE (1996-1999) the deep-blue surface at first seems completely abstract, a sky-like expanse with echoes of Yves Klein’s International Klein Blue. (His blue paintings, it’s easy to forget, were also highly textured.) At the left edge a double vertical line of birds is slowly revealed, standing still and hieratic, gazing toward the other panel. There, a cometlike agglomeration of wattled material, inches thick, hurtles toward the opposite edge.

Approaching closer, the viewer discovers a bird at the apex—a real bird!—its feathers, beak and feet enmeshed with the surrounding blue.

By now Taggart’s intimacy with birds and their multivalent symbolism should be clear. From her childhood on a family farm west of Pottstown, she retains a strong memory of working for her uncle, plucking feathers from turkeys. When encountering dead birds and other small animals as a girl, she would be the one to prepare a small box and flowers, and give them a decent burial. Having discovered five dead birds in a barn recently, she did not hesitate to bring them to her Norristown studio; making one of them a permanent part of this painting felt in some way like offering it a final resting place. The series of small, succinct bird “portraits” from 1999, each individual and seeming lost in deep thought, was also inspired by the found birds.

The painting King’s Daughter (1990-2000) offers what feels like a tender and hard-won note in the accretion of meanings to the bird-images. Here, Taggart returned to an already-finished painting, and from the thick, coppery-brown ground, gouged out a simple, rounded bird form in the center. Flecked with gold paint, cut back to and through the canvas, it carries suggestions of a shallow grave, or a Pharaonic animal mummy. The living thing is gone; only its container remains. For the ancient Egyptians, the human soul, the Ba, was given the shape of a bird. This humble apparition binds loss and renewal into a concise hieroglyph.

As the paintings grow larger, their surfaces compel more attention, and the images appear more fragmentary, half-embedded or revealed. The large, desert-toned Capon Springs (1990-1999), with its rust-and moss color-field and scumbled, rocky-textured “outcrops,” calls up memories of Altamira and other cave paintings. As with the master paleolithic painters, the images that float into visibility—two small, sleek animal heads, a row of teeth—feel tucked into, or discovered from, the surrounding marks.

The largest painting here, Genesis (1999; at 78″ x 132″, her largest to date) shares the sunburnt colors of Capon Springs. Engagement with its distinctive, grandly scarred and wrinkled surface reveals it to be a cauldron of forming shapes, with birds, floating birds-heads, stubbornly lively bird-claws, a downward-diving red fish, and even a cave-painter’s handprint. It shares an open central field with its even larger namesake-drawing, and with it that sense of dizzy vortex, of all things possible. Here and throughout her work, Taggart’s images beckon to us, dancing in and out of their painting-existence, reminding us of the deeply mysterious play of manifestation, and redolent of the emotion that, for humans, is inevitably entrained with that dance.

Miriam Seidel

Miriam Seidel is an art critic and Corresponding Editor for Art in America. She also writes on the arts for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Attache Magazine.

Joel Fisher

In this questioning process it is not the answer that is important, many times there is no answer, but the thought provoking process that evolves. The stimulus for this process can be as simple as a phrase….a word….a feeling….a sound….a memory….a sensing….a thought…a sight….a touch. Questioning in this way is part of a natural process of living and an essential part of creating.