In this soup we swim is a small sample – a soupçon - of the rich and strange chorus of art making in London, Kent, Sussex and Devon.
The photographic work exhibited here by Finlay Taylor is titled 'Viva la Vida' after Frida Kahlo's still life of the same name which Taylor visited whilst on a research trip in Mexico during 2003. The still life painting of watermelons by Kahlo was also her last work before her death in 1954.
Taylor's work depicts a watermelon cut in half being eaten by snails, a meeting of food and sexuality implied by the imagery and referencing Taylor's own interest in snails and molluscs more widely. In Kahlo's images she uses snails as a symbol, they float in the picture spaces offering an idea, often quoted as a protective home or sanctuary. Taylor's research into Kahlo's practice, the wider history of still life and the biological and symbolic understandings of snails led to the development of this work.
Here Taylor plays on the sensual nature of colour, moisture, melons, touch and food, as well as contrary notions of desire, repulsion and lust and devouring.

The curator of the exhibition Dan Howard-Birt describes some of his decisions for selecting works in the show as follows 'All of the works in this exhibition excavate interstitial gaps between figure and ground, between states of bloom and decay, and in the collision of different systems of language. mud doctor The sense within each work that something (meaning, form, coalescence) is both arriving and retreating is echoed in the show as a whole; a chorus of many voices check, compliment and contradict one another. In this soup we swim exults in the non-definitive, the fluid, the unstable and the vitality of lively exchange over reductive consensus'.