NICOLA TURNER
FABRIC OF UNDOING
OPENING FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 6—8PM
ON VIEW JANUARY 25 — MARCH 15, 2025
In dreams, substances move differently. Solid forms appear weightless and vice versa. The living surprise us; the dead come back to life. Something heavy and viscous glides along as though set on wheels. The material world is unsettled, and it unsettles the dreamer, who wakes to a world that feels subtly transformed. We might feel a similar thrilling unease when encountering Nicola Turner’s new installation, which presents imposing tentacular forms animated by the glinting silver legs of disused hospital trolleys. Turner’s entities defy categorization. The sculptures are comprised of horsehair and wool encased in netting stitched into tendrils with textured surfaces that Turner twists together into larger shapes. They are somehow creaturely despite lacking any recognizable animal or human features. They evoke an eerie landscape marked by billowing smokestacks and wooded areas in states of dereliction. Yet they are more primordial than this, more abstract. They are ooze; they are ash. They are ‘dead matter,’ as Turner says, but they’re charged with a vitality that insists on some form of afterlife.
More than anything, they are ‘tentacular figures’ to use a phrase favored by feminist philosopher Donna Haraway, with whom Turner is in active dialogue. A tentacle experiences perception tactually and reciprocally: sight and touch, subject and object, are always intertwined. Coiled around found structures, Turner’s sculptures embody Haraway’s theory of vision as a haptic entanglement with what’s seen, as a dense affective interchange rather than a ‘surveying from above’. Seen through Haraway’s lens, Turner’s mysterious organisms not only acquire a deep-sea creature’s complex sensory apparatus, but also present a subversive metaphor about the workings of sight itself. The tentacle’s expansive, grasping reach in part explains the feeling inspired by Turner’s sculpture. It’s impossible not to be engrossed in the world they inhabit, to feel addressed by them, to respond.
The dead haunt Turner’s sculptures. Though their large, coal-black protuberances look more arachnid than human, there’s an undefinable quality to them that feels fleshly. Perhaps it’s a ghost of their origins. Turner salvages her horsehair from old mattresses. The bed is an archive of the sleeper: it holds her most intense moments as well as her most forgettable and habitual. Many begin and end their lives there: it’s a stage for birth and death. But the bed is also an anchor, a place to round off each day in preparation for another. Turner guts the mattresses as you might a fish, but it’s the innards she’s interested in. Masses of horsehair form tendrils that reach up and grasp outwards, grafted onto metal structures that are set in motion on ambulatory fixtures. Metal legs give the impression of floating, lifting the material from the ground like a fog that hangs over a field at dawn. But the steel frames themselves invite attention, are saturated with memory in much the same way as the mattresses. The use of these trolleys brings a human presence into the installation and underlines the biomorphic nature of Turner’s forms. They also gloss Turner’s technique of stitching materials together as a reparative act, and suggest bodies riven by sutured wounds.
The gallery in which the installation resides occupies an old laundry. Another site of bodies in states of humdrum activity, more private histories and memories. Coincidently, Turner’s studio was also once a laundry: she is familiar with the space’s ghosts. If a laundry is tasked with erasing the visible traces of the body, then Turner has turned the site on its head. Turner’s installation is an accumulation of a collective body’s affects and associations, stories, impressions and sensations. Turner gives these states concrete ciphers: she gives them the heft of an animal’s pelt and the agility of anything on wheels. She invites us to watch them move, to be moved by them and move with them.
Essay by Rebecca Birrell, Leverhulme Trust Fellow at The University of St Andrews and Research Associate at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK. Birrell is author of This Dark Country; Women Artists, Still Life and Intimacy in the Early Twentieth Century.
For press inquiries, please contact Elisa Smilovitz at elisa@elisasmilovitz.com
Nicola Turner (b. 1967, United Kingdom) is a sculptor and installation artist based in Bath, UK. She holds a MA in Fine Art from Bath Spa University, Bath (2019) and a BA in Theatre Design from Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London (1989). With a background in set and costume design, Turner has over twenty years of international collaborations, designing productions for The Royal Opera House, London; San Francisco Opera; Scottish Ballet; Royal Shakespeare Company; Nashville Ballet; National Theatre; and Sydney Opera House, where she was the recipient of the Green Room Award and Helpmann Award.
In 2024, her monumental, site-responsive sculpture, The Meddling Fiend, debuted in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Recent solo exhibitions include The Fabric of Undoing, CARVALHO PARK, New York; The Uninvited Guest from the Unremembered Past at the Tyntesfield National Trust House, North Somerset, UK (2024); and Myth and Miasma at the Skaftfell Centre for Visual Arts, Iceland (2022). Group exhibitions include those with Bomb Factory, London (2024); Somerset Rural Life Museum, Glastonbury, UK (2024); RWA Open, Royal West of England Academy, Bristol, UK (2024); Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK (2024); Sir Hilliers Gardens, Romsey, UK (2024); and at Llantarnam Grange, Cwmbran, Wales (2024). Turner is a recipient of the RWA Academy Award, granted by the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol, UK; the Developing your Creative Practice (DCYP) Grant; the Emerging Sculptors Development Award from Chapel Arts Studios (CAS); and Roche Court Educational Trust.