HOW would you depict noise?

In Sally Taylor’s head, it is a mouthful of triangles, a motif that gives her artwork a jagged edge that led to her shortlisting for the 2011 Jerwood Drawing Prize and her selection to exhibit a piece in Afternoon Tea: Works On Paper with London’s WW Gallery at 54th Venice Biennale in June.

As she prepares to open her latest show at tonight’s preview at Bar Lane Studios in York, the Ryedale artist says: “I’m interested in the sense that within contemporary society there’s an idea emerging that you are deemed inadequate if you can’t communicate verbally – that there’s no place for those who are shy or meek in the contemporary world we inhabit.

“A certain emphasis is placed on predominant characteristics and attributes, for example being pushy, assertive and forthright; making your voice heard.”

Raw and suffused with nervous energy, the works convey a sense of isolation and alienation, feelings first felt in schooldays. “I can remember, even at primary school teachers were freaked out if you were shy and they thought there was something wrong with you if you didn’t want your voice to be heard,” says Sally, a petite Lancastrian who grew up in Bury and is now a freelance lecturer in fine art at York St John University.

“The artworks are very much about uncomfortable feelings. There’s the idea that these mouths are digesting or spitting out these angular, pointy shapes, these triangles – and it’s not a nice thought. Even a piece of Toblerone chocolate can be clunky.”

From her studio in farm buildings in Stonegrave, Sally works furiously, or at least she will start doing so again, now that baby son Joel, born last Christmas Eve, is in reach of his first birthday.

“I draw every day,” she says. “I’m obsessive. It has to be every day and more often than not it’s paper and pencil and drawn in an obsessive way, so there can be hundreds of drawings in a day.

“It’s ritualistic and repetitive, and when I find a motif that interests me, I’ll draw it over and over and over again. What interests me is limiting the variations, and working with a single motif means I have to wrestle to get the best out of it I can. That’s why the idea of repetition is absolutely fundamental to my work.”

She is aware such a philosophy rubs against the grain of the in-vogue art practices of today. “The repetition is my way of making myself the best I can, whereas for lots of artists now, the trend is to work across disciplines. I feel the opposite,” says Sally. “I’d be happy to be in a room with paper and pencils and glue and I don’t need anything else.”

She is not alone in her fascination with triangles. “They’re linked to the likes of Kandinsky and Ben Nicholson; the list is endless, but for me my interest came from a statement by the artist Louise Bourgeois, who said that triangles mean trouble,” says Sally.

“In the pieces I’m working on at the moment, the mouths are often detached from the rest of the face or the body. They’re almost like creatures in their own right, metamorphosing from being recognisable human mouths into being autonomous beings with their own character.

“I like the idea of my triangles being authoritative figures who are shouting. The shapes spilling out of their mouths may be instructions on how to live our lives, but also I think they could be instructions from my mouth.

“I suppose the drawings are about the consequences of what we say and not thinking of those consequences, but also the difficulties of spelling and the difficulties of processing information and then articulating it.”

The mouths may be full of triangles/angular words, but Sally constructs her drawings on the inside jackets and pages of books that have fallen silent, cast out into car boot sales, their spine broken.

“What I do has lots of links to art history, through the use of the triangle, but there’s history in the books and paper too, as I love finding old paper that’s interesting to work on, not only because of its aesthetic quality but also because the books have had their own journey, but then been discarded,” says Sally.

“I enjoy the idea of taking them on another journey and superimposing my own marks on what’s already there, such as dedications and notes – and I also like the thought that book covers open and shut like a mouth, which is quite humorous really.”

While on the subject of humorous, there are those who think the outwardly child-like pencil works must be a subversive joke by Sally, but not so. “Every little mark is scrutinised by me,” she says. “The drawings are about truth, they’re about authenticity, they’re about communication in its purest form. They’re aggressive marks, almost sculpted into the paper, almost cut into the surface and that takes a certain amount of confidence, as I seek to achieve a balance between emotional resonance and a strong aesthetic.”

Sally is not yet finished with mouths and triangles, even after four years. “Other people may feel I’ve exhausted the mouth and triangle motif but, for me, there are so many other directions to go with it,” she says. “I want to use it in as many ways as possible to communicate.”

Sally Taylor’s exhibition runs at Bar Lane Studios, Bar Lane, York, from tonight’s 7pm to 9pm preview until January 14. Opening hours are 9am to 4pm, Tuesday to Friday; 10am to 4pm, Saturdays. A colour brochure is available, funded by the Arts Council of England as part of six months’ support for Sally’s show at Ryedale Folk Museum in Hutton-le-Hole in September and October.