Curated by Sam Taylor Johnson

The acclaimed artist and director shares her exclusive edit and discusses her work, how moving to L.A. changed her style and why she’s always looking forward to what’s next

- DANIELLE RADOJCIN

It’s already dark on a wet and windy January evening in London, and Sam Taylor-Johnson, the film director and artist, is singing her favourite David Bowie song down the phone to me. She is at home in sunny Los Angeles, where it’s the middle of the morning and she’s just back from walking her three dogs up the canyon that runs behind the house she shares in the Hollywood Hills with her husband, the actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson, and her four daughters.

The reason for this melodic interlude – ‘Fill Your Heart’ from Hunky Dory, as it happens – is that we are discussing her episode of Desert Island Discs, the long-running BBC4 radio show in which guests discuss the eight records they would take to a desert island, and in which, she is sorry to say, she did not include said Bowie track.

The interview was recorded all the way back in 2005, and a great deal has changed for her in the intervening years. "I think of myself in survival mode, that headspace that I was in back then, as opposed to now, which is much gentler," she says.

At that time, she was a bright star of British art. Originally from Croydon, south London, she had graduated from Goldsmiths University just behind Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas; earned a Turner Prize nomination and a solo show at Chisenhale Gallery; garnered the attention of the public with works like David Beckham Sleeping (2004) and Crying Men (2004); and married and had two children with the art dealer and gallerist Jay Jopling, all the while operating at the nexus of London’s glamourous social scene (Kate Moss held her infamous 30th ‘Beautiful and Damned’-themed 30th birthday party at TaylorJohnson’s). She had also survived two bouts of cancer, referring to her mastectomy in her Self Portrait in Single Breasted Suit with Hare (2001).