Jason deCaires Taylor

Jason deCaires Taylor (born 12 August 1974 in Dover) is a British sculptor and creator of the world's first underwater sculpture park – the Molinere Underwater Sculpture Park – and underwater museum – Cancún Underwater Museum (MUSA).

He is best known for installing site-specific underwater sculptures that develop naturally into artificial coral reefs, which local communities and marine life depend on.

Taylor integrates his skills as a sculptor, marine conservationist, underwater photographer and scuba diving instructor into each of his projects.

By using a fusion of Land Art traditions and subtly integrating aspects of street art, Taylor produces dynamic sculptural works that are installed on the ocean floor to encourage marine life, to promote ocean conservation and to highlight the current climate crisis.

Taylor's works in Grenada have been listed among the Top 25 Wonders of the World by National Geographic.

His projects to date include the creation of the Cancún Underwater Museum, Ocean Atlas, The Rising Tide , Museo Atlántico, Nest, Coralarium, Nexus, Museum of Underwater Art (MOUA), Écomusée sous-marin de Cannes, and the Museum of Underwater Sculpture Ayia Napa (MUSAN).

The only son of an English father and Guyanese mother, Taylor was educated in Kent with further studies at Camberwell College of Arts Institute of London, where he graduated in 1998 with a B.A Honours degree in Sculpture and Ceramics.

Scuba diving from the age of 18, he became a fully qualified scuba instructor in 2002.

Taylor's early work includes Vicissitudes, Grace Reef, The Lost Correspondent and The Unstill Life.

All of these artworks are located in the world's first public underwater sculpture park in the Caribbean Sea in Molinere Bay, Grenada, West Indies, and situated in a section of coastline that was badly damaged by Hurricane Ivan in 2004.

Taylor's works create haunting, enigmatic underwater scenes, often depicting the mundaneness of life on dry land transported into an alchemic new environment.

Instead of the entropic process typically associated with the ocean's corrosive tendencies, Taylor's pieces encourage organisms to grow and affect the surfaces of his creations.

They are often commentaries on humanity's relationship with the natural world and the need for conservation, decay and rebirth.

The majority of his sculptures are based on living people who are life cast and whose phenotypical qualities alter over time as they slowly evolve from inert concrete to living artificial reefs.

Taylor considers that he is "trying to portray how human intervention or interaction with nature can be positive and sustainable, an icon of how we can live in a symbiotic relationship with nature."

The project was supported and commissioned in 2008 by CONANP, National Commission of Mexican Protected Natural Areas (Comisión Nacional de Áreas Naturales Protegidas) and The Cancún Nautical Association.

In 2009 Taylor relocated his practice to Mexico, where he achieved another milestone: the creation of the world's first underwater museum.

The Cancún Underwater Museum (Museo Subacuático de Arte, known as MUSA) holds more than 485 of Taylor's submerged sculptures and 30 land-based pieces.

It is located off the coast of Cancún and the Western coast of Isla Mujeres within the Cancún National Marine Park, and occupies an area of over 420 square metres of previously barren seabed.

MUSA was officially opened in November 2010.

Works in the museum include individual installations implanted with live coral cuttings rescued from areas of damaged reef.

Hombre en llamas (Man on Fire), cast from a local fisherman, stands towards the current with fragments of implanted fire coral in his head and torso.

La Jardinera (The Gardener) is a girl lying on a patio nurturing a variety of potted corals.

Other works include El colecionista de los sueños (The Dream Collector), a man archiving messages found inside bottles that have been brought together by the oceans’ currents.

Taylor created La Evolución Silencio (The Silent Evolution), which was added to MUSA in 2011.

The artwork consists of more than 400 individual sculptures that immortalised about 90 real-life models from the nearby fishing village of Puerto Morelos to create a community of people, standing in defence of their oceans.

The location for this particular installation was chosen to redirect visitors away from nearby natural reefs, providing these with the opportunity to regenerate.

MUSA is referenced as one of the largest and most ambitious projects underwater in the world.

While continuing to produce additional pieces for MUSA, Taylor completed a unique creation for illusionist David Copperfield.

The Musician, which is a full-scale mermaid seating at a Steinway concert grand piano replica, can be found in Musha Cay, Bahamas.

The piano plays soft classical music, similar to the sound of a whale or dolphin, as divers approach.

By the end of 2013, Taylor had placed nearly 700 sculptures around the globe.

In 2014 Ocean Atlas was installed in the Bahamas weighing 60 tons and measuring 5 metres in height.

Taylor's immense sculpture modelled after a local Bahamian girl, depicts her carrying the weight of the ocean, referencing the ancient Greek myth of Atlas.

Ocean Atlas was awarded a Guinness World Record for being the largest single figurative underwater sculpture in the world.

The Rising Tide was Taylor's first tidal installation in Central London and was part of the 2015 Totally Thames Festival.

The series of working horses with riders, loosely based on the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, were positioned within sight of the Houses of Parliament.

"I quite like the idea that the piece sits in the eye line of the place where many politicians and so many people who are involved in climate change all work and make these damaging deals and policies, yet who are in this state of mad denial," Taylor said.

The artwork was intended to provide a metaphor for rising sea levels, demonstrating how little time there is to act to climate change, yet crucially it offers hope as it resets itself each day, offering humankind the opportunity for change.

After relocating to Lanzarote, Spain in 2016, Taylor began work on his second underwater museum, Museo Atlántico, 1000 ft offshore.