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Daphne Taylor was born in 1955 to a Philadelphia Quaker family with deep historic roots reaching over two hundred years. Her arrival at quilt making has had a path equally interesting, but far more indirect. Variations of art mediums and combinations of them have always stimulated Daphne. As an undergraduate at Rhode Island School of Design, she studied ceramics and developed her love of craft traditions. While working on her MFA in painting at the University of Pennsylvania, she continued her life long discipline of drawing, which to this day, influences the stitching patterns in her quilt work. One medium cannot be completely separated from the other.
Her close association with the Quaker traditions have also continued to be an essential influence in her life and work. The curious and profound silence of a Quaker meeting can be felt in the patient, meditative lines of her quilts, which are composed of rare fabrics. Her compositions also frame challenging relationships of colors and other formal tensions, suggesting that there is never an easy or obvious blueprint to her quilts. Like the complex silence felt in a Quaker meeting, the world within Taylor’s quilts is hardly a straightforward place.
Taylor divides her time between teaching in New York City and rural Maine.