Artist and fine art student at Winchester School of Art, practicing in Hampshire, Berkshire and London.
A member of arjeea21, an artist-led group promoting contemporary art in the Reading area (see link below).
Experimenting with painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking and performance. Current work explores themes of society, poverty and the role of religious faith in a post-modern world.
Company Secretary of Greenbelt festival - ' a collision of faith, justice and the arts' (see link below).
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
thirteen days in spring: walking in relation to the kindness of strangers
Preview a copy of my new book with all seventy-seven drawings and a selection of photographs and text documenting the thirteen-day walk from Winchester to Canterbury.
A mind-map showing a few of the influences on my personal art-history.
My work for the ‘WORN’ project considers ethics and labour-rights in the global textile and clothing industry.
Using three pairs of Marks and Spencer Boxer Shorts made in Sri Lanka, and hand-painted in Winchester, I propose a traffic-light system for ethical standards in high street clothing. This would be similar to the system we now have on supermarket food packaging, where we are told the level of unsaturated fat, salt, sugar etc. The clothing version could have red/amber/green indicators for categories including comparative pay-rates, freedom of association/trade union recognition, security of employment contracts, fair working hours etc.
This is NOT intended to be taken as a practical proposition – it would not be workable, given the complexity of the supply-chain and the subjectivity of some of the judgments involved. However, I hope the proposal will generate discussion about the way workers are still being exploited in developing countries while making clothes for our high street stores, and what we might do about it. We know from recent reports (e.g. War on Want/Labour behind the Label, reported in the Observer 12 December 2010) that
“some of the biggest stores on the British high street use Indian sweatshops that pay poverty wages and break labour laws to keep costs to a bare minimum. Marks & Spencer, Next, Monsoon, Debenhams, Dorothy Perkins and Miss Selfridge are all named as having used factories which exploit their workers.”
In a recent survey by the International Federation of Textile Garment and Leather Workers (April 2011), of 83 factories surveyed in Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines, not one of those 83 factories paid a living wage to workers. Many employed workers on less than their country’s legal minimum wage and yet they were supplying some of the biggest brand names in UK clothing retail.
I hope that my ‘traffic-lights’ outfit will highlight these issues in an engaging way.
I’ve had the privilege of collaborating with Lydia Keith and Charlotte Dore over the last few weeks. Our first collaboration, entitled “1,2,3 Occupy” included some performative elements, of which this film is a record.Victory Walk, November 2011
(Collaboration between Lydia Keith Peter Driver & Charlotte Dore, camera Jay Heathfield)
1,2,3 Change! (Final Act Three of Three) At The Event II, a collaboration between Lydia Keith, Charlotte Dore and Peter Driver
1,2,3 Change! (Act Two) at The Event II, collaboboration between Lydia Keith, Charlotte Dore and Peter Driver
1,2,3 Change! (Act One)
Performance for The Event II Collaboration by Lydia Keith, Charlotte Dore & Peter Driver
Commemorating the Winchester Geese, 2011. Oil and mixed media on canvas 60x80cm.
This work is my interpretation of the community ‘shrine’ which has developed at the Crossbones Graveyard, Southwark in recent years. It commemorates the unconsecrated burial ground discovered on this site in Redcross Way, not far from Tate Modern. In medieval times, prostitutes in that area were known as ‘Winchester geese’ because they were licensed by the Bishop of Winchester to operate in the part of Southwark known as the ‘Liberty of the Clink’. Because they had lived and died ‘in sin’ they were ineligible for burial on consecrated ground. Crossbones became a general paupers’ burial ground until the early 19th Century. When the Museum of London excavated the site they estimated there had been 15,000 burials there. Because of the link with Winchester, I wanted to make a work in Winchester which commemorated this aspect of the medieval church’s relationship with destitution and exploitation. The construction of ‘The Shard’ in the background also highlights the continuing contrast between the enormous wealth and poverty which still coexist in London. There might also be something here about the masculine and feminine aspects of that relationship.
Occupy LSX, St Paul’s 2011. Oil on canvas 60x80cm
I made this painting in response to the Occupy LSX demonstration, which I’ve visited a few times. I have been interested in the relationship with the Cathedral authorities at St Paul’s and the personal implications for people of faith who have felt a conflict between the position of the authorities with what people are interpreting as the prophetic role of the church to speak truth to power on behalf of the poor and dispossessed. The line ‘we are the 99%’ refers to the inequality in Western society between the bulk of people who are seeing their circumstances deteriorate through the global financial crisis and the small minority at ‘the top’ who hold on to power and their exponentially growing wealth. However, the fact is that almost all of us in the West are among the 1%, if we consider global inequality and the absolute poverty and exploitation of people and resources which is systemic in the way wealth is created.
Occupy LSX, October 2011. A photograph taken on 35mm film.
