About
Nicola Turner is a UK based artist. Recent exhibitions include Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2024, London; Song of Pysche, Shtager Shch, London; New Day, New Dawn, Bomb Factory Art Foundation, Marylebone, London; We Are for The Dark, 195 Mare Street, Hackney, London; The Chapter House, Wells Art Contemporary, Somerset; Echoed Ecstasy, Od Arts Festival, Somerset; Norwich Art Path, Sainsbury Centre & Norwich Castle Museum, Norfolk; Myth and Miasma, Skaftfell Centre for Visual Arts, Iceland; Lapses, Shatwell Farm; Somerset; Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, London; Materiality, Walcot Chapel, Bath, UK; Winter Sculpture Park, Gallery No32, London; DOOResidency, Amsterdam, NL and Stone Lane Gardens Sculpture Exhibition, , Dartmoor, where she won the Ashburner Prize.
With a background in set and costume design Turner has over twenty years international experience. She graduated from Central St Martins School of Art & Design and has designed for The Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, Nashville Ballet, Scottish Ballet, Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre and Sydney Opera House where she was the recipient of a Green Room Award and Helpmann Award. In 2019 she completed a MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University. In 2023 she founded FORM-ica, an independent collective of artists in her hometown. Turner is also a founding director of Bath Art Depot.
Turner investigates dissolution of boundaries, liminal states, and continuous exchanges across ecosystems. In doing so, she explores the interconnection of life and death, human and non- human, attraction and repulsion. She combines found objects that hold traces of memory, with the shapes of living forms, and materials from organic ‘dead’ matter such as horsehair - a material used previously for bedding and furniture and, in that regard, alive with history and memory. She explores how these materials give off energy forces, including how “dead” matter can provoke a visceral aversion and attraction, that can provoke new ways of looking. Her pieces are part of a vital and thriving microcosmos comprised of human and non-human agents which functions mostly beyond our conscious contemplation. Her work resonates with the notion of abjection, the capacity of the world to disorient and connect to primal instinct and, consequently, within the abject there is an acute awareness of melancholy and death. Amid this state of confusion and unsettlement, however, an affirmation of life’s forces is simultaneously allowed to arise. Turner draws on her own experience of loss, bereavement and medical intrusions. Her work and the materials used provoke awareness of the entanglement of life, challenging individuality and creating awareness of the wider interconnected energies of which we are a part.
Response to Turner’s work (shared with permission): “I’ve suffered PTSD and associated darkness over the last 15 years and your work (to me) is both reflective of the trauma still trapped inside me (molten forms) but also the soft, cosy blanket of loneliness that I sometimes choose to wrap around me (in my head the matt ones smell reassuringly of sheep wool).......I am very grateful to you for providing me visual representations of feelings that are not easy to admit to or share. I hope creating them has brought you comfort.”
photograph by Maxwell Attenborough
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