ARTIST STATEMENT
In Drawn and Quartered, the pig does not represent the woman who was demeaned—it represents the man who wielded the slur. I turn the insult back onto its origin, placing the offender rather than the offended under scrutiny. The butcher-chart diagram becomes a symbolic dissection of the man who attempted to reduce a woman through language, exposing the anatomy of misogyny with the same blunt force he tried to use against her.
The frantic marks, fragmented colors, and overlapping words evoke the chaos we feel when language is weaponized, but here that turmoil surrounds the perpetrator. He is the one carved open, quartered, examined. Every slur scribbled across the surface becomes part of his reckoning, not hers. By redirecting the violence of the insult, the painting refuses the centuries-old pattern in which women are diminished while men remain unexamined.
This work challenges the way misogynistic language seeps into culture unchecked. Instead of allowing the insult to land on the woman it targeted, I visually return it to the speaker—forcing accountability, refusing erasure, and refusing silence. The female body is not dissected here; the male entitlement that justified the slur is. Drawn and Quartered transforms a derogatory term into a site of reversal. Rather than being quieted, the woman’s presence is implied through her power: she is not the subject of ridicule, but the catalyst for exposure. The painting stands as a reclamation—an insistence that language meant to diminish women instead reveals the smallness of those who use it.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Scotti Taylor is a mixed-media artist whose work interrogates the intersections of language, memory, and the female body. Drawing from lived experience as a mother, caregiver, and chronic observer of human behavior, her practice explores how words—both spoken and unspoken—shape identity, power, and emotional inheritance. Taylor’s visual language blends gestural abstraction, text, and symbolic figuration, creating layered compositions that reflect the complexities of womanhood in a culture that so often seeks to categorize, diminish, or silence it. Her work frequently examines the emotional residue left behind by interpersonal and societal dynamics: the harm of misogynistic language, the weight of expectation, and the quiet strength forged through endurance.
Through collage, mark-making, and expressive color fields, she reveals how the female experience is continually rewritten through acts of reclamation and resistance. Taylor’s paintings confront discomfort without sensationalizing it, inviting viewers to question not only the narratives imposed upon women, but also the systems that allow such narratives to persist.
Based in Oceanside, California, Taylor’s art has been featured in gallery exhibitions, public installations, and juried shows throughout Southern California and beyond. Her broader creative work includes writing, digital storytelling, and multimedia projects centered on resilience, social critique, and expanded definitions of care. Across all mediums, Taylor approaches her work with the belief that art is not merely a mirror but an intervention—an act of speaking back, reassembling what was fractured, and refusing to be quieted.
© Scotti Taylor