Island artist Taylor Stone’s first-ever solo show is really three exhibitions in one, all infused with her love of the magical and fantastic.
The show is called There’s Nothing But Witches and Wizards Out There and it offers a rare look at Ms. Stone’s early work in printmaking, which she studied at the Savannah College of Art and Design before turning to the colorful cut-paper designs she’s best known for today.
The exhibition opened on Oct. 27 at the Workshop Gallery in Vineyard Haven and continues through Nov. 18.
“I fell in love with printmaking, but it requires more tools and space than I knew I would have when I graduated,” Ms. Stone told the Gazette during a gallery tour this week.
Her wood and linoleum block prints of woodland creatures and imaginary “forest guardians” reveal her maturing skills, as well as a creative spark fueled by her reading for English classes.
“My two favorite courses in college were probably the world mythologies class and Arthurian literature,” she said.
Ms. Stone, who attended Edgartown School and Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, also is influenced by the work of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation company known for films like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.
Her exhibition’s title comes from the 2004 Studio Ghibli movie Howl’s Moving Castle, she said. Recorded excerpts from Ghibli soundtracks and video games accompany the show.
“I love working to this kind of music,” she said.
Ms. Stone’s second show-within-a-show at the Workshop highlights her work in cut paper, including handmade potted cactus plants and framed, three-dimensional cut-paper wall pieces of broom-riding witches and lush forest scenes. She also has a line of prints, boxed jigsaw puzzles and greeting cards representing Island vistas, lighthouses and landmarks.
The third and most enchanted part of Ms. Stone’s solo debut at the Workshop is the Dragon Room. Concealed behind a black curtain, the darkened space contains one small bench and an enormous, illuminated dragon that wraps around three walls, waves of color pulsating endlessly from its long, sinuous body.
The effect is immediate and transforming, evoking a sense of being on the edge of another realm, separated from the magical only by this undulating, scaly sentinel.
“It’s almost like a sensory deprivation room,” she said. “You know, you think you’re in a different place. The world goes away.”
Working by hand with a precision blade and black craft board, Ms. Stone cut out every scale and line of her dragon design before mounting it in the gallery, with color-changing LED backlights to bring the three-D stencil alive.
Her largest and most complex cut piece ever, it all came together in one frantic week before the show opened, Ms. Stone said.
“I obsessed about the drawing for a really long time. And then all of a sudden, the show was going up in a week. And I hadn’t started in the production. And I hadn’t even thought about installation,” she recalled.
Inviting gallery visitors into her art-making process, Ms. Stone saved all the cut-out pieces to display in an adjoining room alongside her drawings for the work. She has also provided a table and art supplies for visitors to draw dragons of their own and add them to the wall, where a menagerie of mythical winged serpents has been growing since the show opened.
All ages are welcome, but grown-ups have done most of the drawings so far — including, among the magical reptiles, one detailed rendering of an International Dragon one-design sailboat.
“It’s okay to play. It’s okay to not be serious. And it’s okay to do things just because you want to. And that’s kind of why I love my little dragon wall,” Ms. Stone said.
There’s Nothing But Witches and Wizards Out There is open Thursday through Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. at the Workshop Gallery, 32 Beach Road in Vineyard Haven.
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