WHISPER DISH, 2024 

43cm x 32cm x 157cm 

Mixed media including metal and horsehair. 

The title is taken from whisper dishes, also known as parabolic acoustic mirrors. They are large, curved dishes that demonstrate how sound waves can be focused and heard over long distances.They are often used as exhibits in science museums.

A similar phenomena are whispering galleries. The domed geometry of whispering galleries, like those in St. Paul's Cathedral and Grand Central Terminal, amplify sound waves so that whispers can be heard from far away.

In this work I use a found object and reclaimed horsehair, a material used previously for bedding and furniture and, in that regard, alive with history. Through these materials I can hear whispers from the past. 

photos Nicola Turner

RA SUMMER EXHIBITION, 2024

I am honoured to have been invited by Ann Christopher and the Summer Exhibition Committee 2024 to engage with the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Annenberg Courtyard, Royal Academy, London

In my practice I use ‘dead’ matter including wool and horsehair, a material salvaged from old mattresses and furniture, therefore absorbed with a lived history from both its time as a domestic object and as part of an animal. Material with such agency, amassed together, emanates a powerful presence.

I am interested in how Sir Joshua Reynolds looked both backwards and forwards, borrowing compositions, poses and subjects from earlier works while establishing new work. Layers of memories are present in his paintings. Two works of Reynolds that have caught my attention are both late paintings; The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle painted in 1788 and The Death of Cardinal Beaufort painted in 1789.

The Infant Hercules Strangling Serpents in his Cradle was a subject chosen by Reynolds himself, as a commission for Catherine The Great, whose only stipulation was for it to be a history painting. Apparently, Reynolds spent more time working on it than on any other work he created. He was frustrated he was not recognised as a history painter so this must have been a welcome commission. The painting is based on a version of the story by the Greek poet Pindar (translation made by the 17th century English poet Abraham Cowley, whom Reynolds admired). Reynolds depicts Hercules, Zeus’s illegitimate child, as a baby fighting off the two snakes sent by Hera, Zeus’s wife. The dark mass extending from the drawn sword combines clouds, fur, feathers, skin and folding fabric that encircles Hercules. There is a powerful, engulfing, volatile, circular motion of mass that I drew on for my site response.

The Death of Cardinal Beaufort was commissioned for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in 1789. The scene is taken from the second part of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Act III, Scene iii. The death throes of Cardinal Beaufort, who was the Bishop of Winchester and the King’s great uncle, are witnessed by Henry VI, Warwick and Salisbury.

King Henry laments: 

“Look with a gentle eye upon this wretch;

O! beat away the busy meddling fiend

That lays strong siege unto this wretch’s soul

And from his bosom purge this black despair.”

Now at Petworth House, the painting has recently undergone conservation and, by removing many layers of varnish, a ‘meddling fiend’ has been revealed in the darkness. I am interested that Reynolds got criticism for painting the fiend in 1798 and that on later copies of the painting it was etched out and forgotten.

In 1782 Reynolds suffered a paralytic stroke, he struggled to hear in later life and in 1783 had a ‘violent inflammation’ in the eyes, finally losing his sight in 1790. In 1792 he died of liver complications. In his lectures on art, delivered at the Royal Academy, Reynolds stressed the arduous, and thus morally uplifting, nature of art. I am inspired by the way Reynolds juxtaposes the darker shades of life with images of birth and renewal. Samuel Taylor Coleridge quotes Sir Joshua Reynolds as declaring that: “The greatest man is he who forms the taste of a nation; the next greatest is he who corrupts it.”

In my practice I explore the blurred boundaries between life and death. In this state of confusion and unsettlement an affirmation of life’s forces arises. I drew on these two paintings to create a site responsive installation that creates a new space between it and the sculpture of Reynolds.

Photos by Maxwell Attenborough

Material donations from:

Black Sheep Meat Company

Mick Sheridan Upholstery

Played and Remade, The Piano Shop Bath

32cm x 40cm x 60cm

Mixed media including felted wool and a Worcester Chamberlain porcelain gilded coffee cup in the “New Gadroon Tournay” shape, c.1820, and William Page Silver Plated Sugar Tongs.

Part of the exhibition at National Trust, Tyntesfield, Bristol UK

205cm x 70cm x 70cm

mixed media including steel, wool, wood and horsehair

En Pointe perches on sharp points including sheep shears, a pitch fork and a sickle. Personally, I have a fear of letting go and in this piece, I explore the fragility I experience when I do not trust the world around me. In my work I use found objects and material from organic ‘dead’ matter which are all embedded with memories. I explore our connection to past, present and future events and how, in being interconnected to all around us, these influence our outlook.  

100cm h x 15cm w x 11cm d

The Uninvited Guest from the Unremembered Past

National Trust, Tyntesfield

Artist Nicola Turner has disrupted Tyntesfield, home of the Gibbs family for 150 years, with a series of evocative organic installations. They are made from wool and horsehair, materials with deep connections to Tyntesfield. Part of the Somerset economy for hundreds of years, sheep still graze Tyntesfield's fields. Historically the Gibbs family relied on horses for transport, to work their land and, more prosaically, for material with which to stuff their mattresses and furniture. Some of the installations respond to the house, weaving around columns or creeping out of doorways. Others incorporate books, beds, and other Gibbs family belongings. Through these interactions Turner's work explores memory, and how materials and objects connect us to past, present and future.

The exhibition's title comes from a 2011 book by psychotherapist Prophecy Coles. In the work, Coles explores the unconscious impact of past traumas on the present. The 'uninvited guest' becomes a metaphor for traumas that have not been fully processed. These traumas can manifest in various ways, affecting mental health and interpersonal relationships. Nicola Turner's installations at Tyntesfield give these 'uninvited guests' a physical form. They encourage us to reflect on the layers of history that lie hidden beneath the surface, and to investigate our own connections to past, present and future.

Exhibition runs September 7th to 3rd November 2024

Punctum

Campo de Castelforte San Rocco, Venice 2024

35 x 35 x 14

Mixed media inc horsehair, wool and recycled polyamide.

I often travel with my material, in this case out to the Venice Biennale. Placing material in different contexts, evoking different conversations between material and environment. In my practice I work with dead matter, material embedded with lived histories. Horsehair holds memories of the horse and from the domestic items it once formed the stuffing of. I am fascinated by interconnected ecosystems, both human and non-human, and the traces that remain from these interactions.

SPINNING A YARN ART INSTALLATION

Abbey Barn, Glastonbury

Newly commissioned art installation, inspired by the stories and emotional connections provoked by wool.

Wool, horsehair fabric, steel and recycled polyamide

63m x 60cm x 30cm

Most of the wool l use in my practice comes from a flock of Black Welsh Mountain Sheep and a flock of Hebridean Sheep. Both very well cared for and local to where I work. Sometimes a white sheep arrives in the flock. Because colour is recessive, it's unlikely for two black sheep to have a white lamb but there is a fourth place on a sheep's DNA that can affect the animal's colour. This locus is called Extension. This is another locus where only two alleles are possible:

Extension Wild (Ew) - this one has no effect on the animal's colour - it'll be whatever colour the other three loci determine. * Extension Dominant (Ed) - this one floods the animal's cells with melanin and causes both skin and wool to be whatever colour is found on the locus Extension Dominant is dominant, so it's a reversal of the usual rule about white being the dominant colour - and even an animal with the dominant white will still be black because the Extension Dominant gene will override it. To be white the lamb would need both alleles on the Extension locus to be Wild. If it has even one Dominant allele, the lamb will be black. Sheep that carry the Wild allele can have white lambs with another

Extension Dominant is very common in some breeds such as Hebridean or Black Welsh Mountain sheep.

This work will form part of my exhibition @tyntesfieldnt Opening 7th September till 3rd November. https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/visit/bath- bristol/tyntestield/events/ 48e1cdfc-4743-4e24-8460-c1ceb93caf58

Mixed media including wool, wood and recycled polyamide.

130cm w x 103cm h x 45cm d

2023

Mixed media inc wool, horsehair, leather and recycled polyamide 15cm x 19cm x 110cm

Photograph: Nicola Turner

The Song of Psyche: Corners of a Soul's Otherworlds: Nicola Turner, Edward Bekkerman

Shtager&Shch, London

Sat 25 Nov 2023 to Fri 12 Jan 2024

Lower Ground Floor, 51-53 Margaret Street, W1W 8SQ

Wed-Fri 11am-6pm, Sat 11am-5pm

Artists: Nicola Turner - Edward Bekkerman

THE SONG OF PSYCHE: Nicola Turner, Edward Bekkerman

The Song of Psyche: Corners of a Soul's Otherworlds steps into a realm where the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary, and the familiar takes on an otherworldly allure. As the chill of winter looms, the atmosphere becomes charged with an eerie, fairy-tale-like energy, an anticipation that transcends the mundane. During this prelude to the winter holiday season, we invite you to delve into the human condition's mysterious, uncanny, and enchanting aspects. The exhibition presents the dialogue of seemingly opposite, albeit intuitional, dreamscapes. The juxtaposition of difference, however, is a key to the uncharted territories of imagination, where the lines between reality and fantasy blur.

Psychology is the science of the soul; however, the definition of its very core subject remains somewhat mysterious. What constitutes our consciousness, awareness, and feelings — is the fundamental question of ontology, phenomenology and neuroscience. Artistic responses tap into the areas of our cognition with aesthetic take, presenting us with the sensation of thinking through intuitive emotional response. Is the appearance constituting its realness? Is the very fact of rationalisation of the problem of existence a sufficient condition for legitimisation of our reality? Or are we and the surrounding mere projectiles of neurons and our brain as an arch-complex mysterious computing machine?

Edward Bekkerman's colourful paintings manifest the bright complexity of the kaleidoscopic mind. Consisting of rich colour schemes, the countless swirls blend and dissipate one another as the thoughts in restlessly curious minds. "All that is solid melts into air" — the artist said once in an interview. Just as the material solids are temporary, so are the solids of the thoughts and concepts. The swirl and consecrated circles are sacred symbols in many pre-historical cultures. Archaeologists presume that spirals in the Minoan civilisation, for example, could have been the most fundamental depiction of the life span. The metaphysical depth of its essence counterweights the symbol's simplicity — before time became a line, clearly outlining the border between past, present and future, the "spiral" or "circular" time presented life as a conscious pathway from the beginning to the beginning. The linear timeline of nowness shows the end of the line as a tragic cliff, a rapturous lot, which disrupts the gift of life and sends the living away to the dark, unwanted depths of the unknown land of death. Bekkerman's bright canvases hint at the ethereal worlds beyond the visible by our retinas, the reality which might not be graspable by the limited instruments of our phenomenological perception. In the spirit of Robert Smithson's “Spiral Jetty” or Jackson Pollock’s engagement with the unspeakable in mind, the artist’s language continues the complex tradition and legacy of abstraction, walking on the infinitely sharp line between heresy and sanctity.

Nicola Turner's sculptures, reminiscent of Louise Bourgeois's oeuvre, can appear to the viewer as something dreadful. Voluminous, dark and somewhat intimidating, they occupy furniture, climb the walls, linger on the floor, and block the doorways. They are like the thoughts always with us, beacons of the perception — as indicators of possibility or opportunity and danger or fear. The sculptures evoke the chill sensation of bodily presence without the potential to identify them as spirits from the Ghibli Studio universe or props from the play directed by Tim Burton. The taxonomy is thrown into confusion: the creatures are ageless, genderless, and a-aesthetic (as not identifiable as beautiful or ugly). Despite that, their presence is strikingly "real." Turner's sculptural practice throws the perception and definition of "being," the core question of ontology, in the state of stasis — as if she suspends the possibility of categorisation. This gesture opens the potential for a radical democracy of bodies — something that Antonin Artaud, the theorist of radical theatre, dreamed about as a tool of ultimate emancipation for the human soul. The sculptures can appear as cocoons ready to metamorphose into something new: forms of life, ideas, or a whole new being. They open a door for fantasy, and what seems macabre in the beginning turns somewhat familiar and close as a horizon for possibility within the reach of one's imagination.

Our minds are realms where the ordinary transforms into the extraordinary, and the mundane takes on an otherworldly allure. During this prelude to the winter holiday season, we invite you to delve into the human condition's mysterious, uncanny, and enchanting aspects. The duo exhibition of Nicola Turner and Edward Bekkerman presents the dialogue of seemingly opposite, albeit intuitional, dreamscapes. As the chill of winter looms, the atmosphere becomes charged with an eerie, fairy-tale-like energy, an anticipation that transcends the mundane. The juxtaposition of difference, however, is a key to the the uncharted territories of imagination, where the lines between reality and fantasy blur.

by Denis Maksimov-Gupta

Photos / Shtager&Shch / Ben Deakin

Mixed media inc steel, wool and recycled polyamide

114cm × 40cm × 47cm

2023

The title is taken from Heinrich Hoffmann, Der Struwwelpeter, 1845

Bauz! da geht die Türe auf,

und herein in schnellem Lauf

springt der Schneider in die Stub

zu dem Daumen-Lutscher_Bub.

Weh! jetzt geht es klipp und klapp

mit der Scher die Daumen ab,

mit der großen, scharfen Scher!

Hei! da schreit der Konrad sehr.

2023

Mixed media inc wool, horsehair, metal and recycled polyamide 24cm x 25cm x 74cm

Photograph: Nicola Turner

2023

Mixed media inc wool, horsehair, copper and recycled polyamide 22cm x 36cm x 18cm

Photograph: Nicola Turner

BOMB FACTORY ART FOUNDATION

A Group Show of Established and Emerging Artists

A NEW DAWN A NEW DAY

Photos by Joanna Wierzbicka

On the edge of the abyss, we are looking sideways through our fingers

at the end of life

as we know it.

Whilst all around us

there are fires and floods,

we think only of trying

to stay afloat in boats

stacked high with things,

and objects that make us feel at home with the thought that we will survive

if on the horizon, through raging seas, we spy a new way of being.

There is always the belief in redemption, Hope springs eternal.

A Group Show of Established and Emerging Artists

A NEW DAWN A NEW DAY

206 Marylebone Road 8th - 29th October 2023

So what then is the function of art in a world that is defined by economic and environmental collapse, where war and famine are commonplace and disaster lurks at every corner?

Art has always been a representation of humankind, an extraordinary kind of magic that lies beyond comprehension. Whether it is perceived as vital or necessary here is not the question, but in these dark times can the process of making present a resistance in some way to the changing circumstances we find ourselves in?

Art summons wonder and can generate surprising outcomes. Where will it take us in this new chapter? Art summons wonder, so let's wonder, what's next?

The Bomb Factory Art Foundation is an artist-led space that supports over 150 artists with affordable studios across London and a comprehensive support network for its members. This exhibition aims to bring together a mixture of established and emerging artists in a captivating show at our expansive Marylebone gallery.

Featuring works by:

Caroline Ashley | Rong Bao | Rana Begum | Pallas Citroen | Richie Culver | Jeremy Deller | Janette Parris | Jim Rampage | Catriona Robertson | Jacob Talkowski | Erika Trotzig | Nicola Turner | Mark Wallinger | Osman Yousefzada

Od Arts Festival

Sculpture and performance

VENUE

9. Coker Court, East Coker

Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm

Two site-specific sculptural installations have been created for the festival, one in each village. Nicola’s works combine found objects that hold traces of memory, the shapes of living forms and materials from organic ‘dead’ matter such as horsehair – a material traditionally used for bedding and furniture and, in that regard, alive with history and memory.

On Friday at 7.30pm collaborative artist and performer, Clare Whistler will make her own response to the sculpture at Coker Court, in the form of movement. FREE – no booking required.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nicola Turner’s practice investigates the dissolution of boundaries, liminal states, and the continuous exchange of ecosystems.

Clare Whistler is an interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, poetry, music, visual art, site, landscape and communities. Movement and gesture infuse all her work.

mixed media inc horsehair, wool, wood and steel.

800cm x 550cm x 500cm

The installation combines found objects that hold traces of memory and materials from organic ‘dead’ matter such as horsehair - material used for bedding and furniture, hence imbued with lived history. It explores interconnections between beings and matter, ways of listening to past, present and future and the unknown patterns that are transmitted across time. Amid this state of confusion and unsettlement, however, an affirmation of life’s forces is simultaneously allowed to arise. The title comes from a book by Prophecy Coles, on unconscious transmission of intergenerational trauma.

Od Arts Festival

Sculpture and performance

VENUE

3. The Pound, Chur Lane, West Coker

Fri 26 – Sun 28 May, 10am – 5:30pm

Performance Fri 26, 7.30pm

Two site-specific sculptural installations have been created for the festival, one in each village. Nicola’s works combine found objects that hold traces of memory, the shapes of living forms and materials from organic ‘dead’ matter such as horsehair – a material traditionally used for bedding and furniture and, in that regard, alive with history and memory.

On Saturday, collaborative artist and performer, Clare Whistler, will make her own response to the sculpture at The Pound, West Coker in the form of movement.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Nicola Turner’s practice investigates the dissolution of boundaries, liminal states, and the continuous exchange of ecosystems.

Clare Whistler is an interdisciplinary artist who works with performance, poetry, music, visual art, site, landscape and communities. Movement and gesture infuse all her work.

We Are For The Dark is a collaboration between contemporary artists Kate McDonnell and Nicola Turner who met while studying for their MFAs at Bath Spa University. Both working in installation and sculpture, they explore the darker side of the human condition through this exhibition at 195 Mare Street.

The project takes inspiration from a quotation from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, from the final act before Cleopatra’s suicide: “Finish, Lady; the bright day is done and we are for the dark.” The artists propose the idea that death is a life-affirming force, a catalyst that motivates action in the face of our inevitable demise.

There is a bodily nature to Turner’s visceral, organ-like creations. Made of ‘dead’ materials such as horse hair and sheep’s wool, her works erupt from windows and ooze down walls, exuding a sense of unease. McDonnell’s works are similarly uneasy. While Turner’s seem like they are bulging, poised to erupt, McDonnell’s

are wild assemblages of ephemeral and fragile materials, as if the components have exploded from an agitated mind and are clustering together for safety. She manipulates everyday materials to the point of near-destruction, resulting in works that embody the inner workings of an unquiet mind.

Turner’s works speak to the fragility of the body and McDonnell’s speak to the fragility of the mind. However, they each embody feelings that are difficult to express.

Inhabiting and reacting to the dilapidated, domestic space of 195 Mare Street, the artists respond to the history of entwined in the fabric of the building.

LAPSES; immersive installation in the basement. Turner + Whistler Response by Clare Whistler with sound by Jim Blackburn.

8th September, 6-8pm

9-10th September, 11-1pm and 3-5pm

EXPOSITIONS curated by Kendra Matchett

18 - 26 June 22

Expositions brought the work of six artists to Shatwell. What emerged was a series of works that together traversed the conscious and unconscious territories of memory, materiality and space.

Seen here are images of my sculptures and drawings shown in the Atcost Barn and Lapses, a collaboration with Clare Whistler and Jim Blackburn, in the Silo.

Other artists responding to the collections of buildings and drawings were Matt Page, Sandra Porter and Connor Vickery-Gearty.

Photos by Roland Chambers

Silo, Shatwell Farm, Somerset

Curated by Kendra Matchett

Nicola Turner and Clare Whistler with Jim Blackburn

Mixed media installation including horsehair, wool, coir, wood and electric octobass including hair strung bow, fir and pine resin rosin and copper wire.

You Tube link

Within the gloom of the unlit silo one enters the interior through the strange tendrils leaking out

In the dim of the interior, filled with material, almost an invasion

A container that leaks- in a thousand ways

The interior of the body

The cave, the mind, going into a darkness, let’s see what unfurls from there

Within the sculptures

A person responding

And a deep thrum of an octobass, sound under sound

The ingredients for Lapses

by Clare Whistler

Unholy Trinity, 2023

mixed media inc wool, steel and recycled polyamide

98cm x 50cm x 56cm

In this piece I have used vintage steel hand sheep shears, a vintage screwdriver, and a vintage drill. All look to have been hand forged in a furnace. The fleece was kindly donated to me by @black. I have managed to source a sustainably produced recycled polyamide net. The unholy trinity in John Milton's epic poem Paradise Lost consists of Beelzebub, Lucifer, and Astaroth. The three agents of destruction meet at the gates of Hell in Book II: Satan, Sin, and Death. Satan “gave birth” to his daughter “Sin” after pride gave him a headache. “Sin” came forth from his head. Satan then entered into an incestuous union with his daughter Sin and they produced a son named “Death”. Satan heads to Hell’s gates after consulting with his fellow fallen angels on how exactly to get revenge upon God for casting him and his followers out of Heaven. As Satan approaches the gate, he sees an ominous dark and shadowy figure and a creature that is half woman, half snake. He approaches the woman creature and asks her who she is, and she explains that she is Sin and that she and Satan met in Heaven before they were both cast out. “Hast thou forgotten me then, and do I seem now in thine eye so foul, once deemed so fair in Heav’n,” (ln. 747-748). Since Sin is the temptress of Satan, she is also alluded to be the temptress of mankind. Sin serves as the subconscious thoughts on whether a person should do what they know is right or do what they know as wrong.

TURNER + WHISTLER

Residency exploring ‘Skin’ with Clare Whistler

Hawkwood, Stroud

20-24 Feb 2023

‘Why should our bodies end at the skin?’ Donna Haraway.

‘He steps into cold water and his skin dissolves.’ Helen Mort

‘Like all other creatures, human beings do not exist on the ‘other side’ of materiality but swim in an ocean of materials’. Tim Ingold

‘Like the living tree in the ground from which it was made, it inhabits the border zone not between matter and mind but between substance and medium. The wood is alive, or ‘breathes,’ precisely because of the flux of materials across its surface’. Tim Ingold

Foreword by Pari Stave, 

Director of Skaftfell 

An artist residency is a place of retreat. Ideally, it is a period of uninterrupted solitude in which to gather inspiration and nurture creativity. It can also lead to exploration and discovery, looking both inward and outward. 

For British artist Nicola Turner, a residency at Skaftfell Art Center, in East Iceland, was an opportunity to become immersed in a singular place: the small harbor town of Seyðisfjörður, population ca 7OO. Initially settled sometime in the 1Oth or 11th century, and sustained over centuries by sheep farming and fishing, Seyðisfjörður is geographically remote (it is only accessible by car via a high mountain pass) and yet connected to the outside world. This is where, in 19O6, the Atlantic telegraph cable enabled the first modern communication between Iceland and Europe. It is also home to the only ferry service between Iceland and the continent. 

After arriving in Seyðisfjörður, Turner immediately set out on reconnaissance, undeterred by the cold, rainy weather. She wandered along the shorelines and up steep mountainside paths, taking mental notes of the landscape from various aspects. Her observations led to questions about geological and human histories, but also to inquiries about the curious objects she observed in the landscape: scrappy piles of discarded wool found on the farmlands, and, in the fjord itself, a large, mysterious floating ring. 

The wool caught her eye as potential material for a project that was taking shape in her mind. Turner often uses wool in her sculptural practice, its substance being deeply resonant and simply practical. She explains that her mother worked as an upholsterer. Some of Turner’s most evocative sculptures are composed of chairs and settees in which the inner wool batting appears to be exploding from the seams. These works have a cathartic effect, as if exposing the inner stuff of objects that by design intimately conform to the body is an act of liberation from confinement. 

A practical consideration for the sculptor, wool fibre possesses both tensile strength and malleability. At one extreme it can be formed into elegant tendrils of thread; at the other, it can take on bulk and heft. The matted wool Turner found near local sheep farms had an added appeal: as “waste wool” it was available as material. Having brought fishnet stockings to use as casings, Turner packed the wool in the tapered mesh, creating forms like giant octopus arms. She then headed into the landscape, where she staged temporary installations of the woolly limbs. By folding them into sharp crevices or perching them in neat bundles on lichen-covered crags, Turner altered the wool to respond to the contours of each site. Coiling and sinuous, these variable forms took on the appearance of mythical creatures in the landscape, like strange offerings to the souls of the myriad sheep that have roamed the slopes for more than a thousand years. Careful to leave the landscape as she found it, Turner photographed the wool works before removing them. The ephemeral installations were well documented by iPhone in the series of spectacular photographs published here. 

And the floating ring? This is where the story’s circle closes, for the ring is part of an apparatus used by the Icelandic Coast Guard to contain oil leaking from the SS El Grillo, a British tanker sunk by German air attack during World War II. Like the slow bleed of a wound, the oil seepage is a reminder of the less pastoral side of life in Seyðisfjörður, marking that moment when this peaceable place was thrust into the miasma of modern warfare. 

In the end, the waste wool was not wasted. The fleece was donated for use as a boom, absorbing oily slick from the wreck..

Endless Rest, 2021

Mixed media inc horsehair, wool and wood

280cm x 80cm x 75cm

Skaftfell Centre for Visual Arts

Seyðisfjörður, Iceland

British artist Nicola Turner was a Skaftfell artist in residence in November 2022. In her artistic practice, Nicola responds to the specific sites in which she finds herself, keeping an eye out for organic waste material to use in her work At Skaftfell, she embarked on her residency by walking the landscape and absorbing the environment around Seyðisfjörður; informing herself about the local history, farming structures, and geographical features of the place. One of the first features to capture her attention was the floating black circle in the ford. In response to what she learned about the mysterious ring, she created the project Myth and Miasma.

The circular floating fence in the fjord has been laid over the wreck of El Grillo, a 10,000-ton British oil supply ship that was used during World War Il. The floating fend is used as a preventative measure to catch oil spills emanating from the wreck On February 10, 1944, three German planes bombed El Grillo when it was in harbor at Seyðisfjörður. One of the bombs hit the stern causing it to partially sink.

The crew of 48 men escaped but the tanker had sustained considerable damage and was subsequently sunk on the orders of the British Military. There was still a large amount of oil on board. The wreck is I34 meters long and lies at a depth of about 50 meters in the middle of Seyðisfjörður, just outside the harbour. Oil pollution has been noticed from time to time ever since the ship sank. In 1952, about 4.500 tons of oil was pumped from the ship and in 2001, another 60 tons was pumped out. An estimated 10-15 tons of oil still remain. There is speculation that the landslides that hit Seyðisfjörður in December 2020 may have contributed to the problem further by triggering a tidal wave. Heavy crude oil thickens when its cold but in warmer weather can seep slowly through small holes forming an oil slick on the surface of the ocean, which causes wildlife to die.

Matters of Trust is a charity that collects natural waste products including hair, fur, wool and fleece from individuals, salons, groomers and farmers to manufacture felted mat and boom products to soak up petrochemicals in storm drains, wells, filtration systems, rivers and oceans. Their products have been successfully used worldwide, including for the 2010 BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which released over 160 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Wool counts for less than 15% of the income made from sheep in Iceland therefore, with little value, much goes to waste. Turner has been kindly donated waste wool from some Seydisfördur farmers to use in the sculptural installations that she has made as part of her artist residency at Skaftfell. She noticed the similarity in the construction methods she used to those of the Matters of Trust hair booms. After the exhibition at Skaftfell Nicola will donate her 'fleece booms' to the Seyðisfjarðarhöfn, the local port, with the thought that they could be used to soak up any future oil leaks from the El Grillo.

Mixed media including metal, horsehair, wool, silk and feather

100cm x 55cm x 30cm

Geometry of Fear was a term coined by the critic Herbert Read in 1952 to describe the work of a group of young British sculptors characterised by tortured, battered or blasted looking human, or sometimes animal figures. Of their work Read wrote:

These new images belong to the iconography of despair, or of defiance; and the more innocent the artist, the more effectively he transmits the collective guilt. Here are images of flight, or ragged claws ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas’, of excoriated flesh, frustrated sex, the geometry of fear.

The quotation within Read’s text is from the poet T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock. Read’s image of ‘ragged claws “scuttling” may have referred to Meadows’s Black Crab 1952.

During my visit to the Venice Biennale Opening 2022 I responded to the site using material I had transported in my carry on baggage.

For Materiality I created a new work titled Mortuary Chapel Site Response. I also showed Anatomy of Melancholy.

Materiality was a four-woman exhibition at Walcot Chapel Gallery, Bath. Fiona Campbell, Kelly M O’Brien, Kate McDonnell and Nicola Turner exhibited together for the first time in this exhibition celebrating the importance of materials in sculpture and installation art. The exhibition showcased large-scale objects and interventions into the architecture of the gallery space. Programming included performative response by Clare Whistler, private view, artists talks, workshop, and a Materiality Salon Dinner.

Each artist is engaged with sustainability in their practices and they are driven by their materials in the first instance. Curator McDonnell says: “Materials – the stuff that artists work with – have become a way of loading artworks with meaning, and each artist in this exhibition holds the stuff they work with at the heart of their critically-engaged practice.” In Documents of Contemporary Art: Materiality, Petra Lange-Berndt says that ‘To follow the material means to enter a true maze of meanings’. Leaning on the political, social, and psychological interpretations of materials, the artists allow their chosen materials to talk to wider issues. In these works form becomes the servant of the materials.

Strachan + Turner is a collaboration between two artists – Sarah Strachan and Nicola Turner – as part of New Platform Art Lab 2021. The two artists gravitated towards working together at an early stage in the NPA programme, having identified a commonality in their interests and an oppositional aesthetic in their work.

Sarah Strachan is an artist based in Cambridge. In her transdisciplinary practice she senses environmental changes through deep conversations with people, place, the land and the materials and objects associated with these. Sarah is interested in how our perception affects our ecological awareness and thinking and she explores her ideas through printmaking, painting, and ceramics; often fusing sound and/or moving image into final installations.

Nicola Turner is an artist based in Bath. Her work investigates the dissolution of boundaries, in- betweenness, and the continuous exchange of ecosystems. She combines found objects that hold traces of memory, the shapes of living forms, and materials from organic ‘dead’ matter such as horsehair - a material used previously for bedding and furniture.

“Our starting point was a collective reading of Jane Bennett’s manifesto for new materialism - Vibrant Matter” explains Strachan. Working at a distance the pair hosted weekly online meetings to share their understanding of vitality in and of materials.These discussions formed the basis of the Material Conversations residency where Strachan + Turner spent time in each other’s studios during November and December 2021.The physical juxtaposition of their respective materials led to bodily revelations where Strachan’s ceramic vessels became fragile egg shells or orifices which Turner’s horsehair tendrils creeping in and out to caress or suffocate, depending on the configuration and the viewer’s perspective. With a deeper insight into the methods and rituals behind each other’s work, they explored the boundaries and liminal spaces between their practices.“Our conversations turned to the more-than-human...sharing a more fluid, porous or permeable perspective on our perception of the world” says Strachan. This is where the pair came up with their working title, Borborygmi, which having come to recognise the ‘digestive’ qualities of their combined sculptural forms, refers to the sounds that come from the gastrointestinal tract and represents the largest specialised microbial community in the human ecosystem. Finally having established a visual language between their works, the pair experimented further by extending the material conversation beyond the context of the studio. Reflecting on this conversation, Turner refers to their works as: “A meeting, a journey, a shape-shifter” and says “...it’s as if they ebb and flow so we are running to catch up”. The resulting site-responsive installations can be seen in the accompanying photographs.

Mixed media inc wool, hair, cotton and wood

170cm x 60cm x 65cm

In On the Melancholic Imaginary Julia Kristeva writes: “Melancholy is amorous passion's sombre lining. A sorrowful pleasure, this lugubrious intoxication constitutes the banal background from which our ideals or euphoria break away as much as that fleeting lucidity which breaks the trance entwining two people together. Conscious that we are destined to lose our loves, we are perhaps even more grieved to notice in our lover the shadow of a loved object, already lost.”

140cm x 110cm x 85cm

Mixed media including coir, horsehair, wood and nylon.

Anatomy of Melancholy features the skeleton of a loveseat consumed by the guts of its upholstery, which is made of horsehair and coir and is soaked in lived history. We are not individuals, but fluid systems that overlap and exchange microorganisms with other humans and our environment. The title refers to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), a mood that the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva described as ‘amorous passion’s sombre lining […] Conscious that we are destined to lose our loves, we are perhaps even more grieved to notice in our lover the shadow of a loved object, already lost’.

The title is taken from Robert Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621,"The seat of black choler to see. Over his head appears the sky. And Saturn Lord of melancholy."

Mixed media inc wood, brass and wool

220cm x 120cm x 95cm

The title was inspired by this quote:

“To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures.”

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Photo by @mattlincolnphoto

210cm x 75cm x 70cm

Mixed media inc horsehair, wool, wood and nylon.

Created as part of DOOResidency, 2021.

Écho-monde was shown as part of Wells Art Contemporary 2021.

Écho-monde combines traces of memory, material from organic ‘dead’ matter (e.g horsehair) and the shapes of organic form. It explores the interconnection of humans to matter and each other, and the awareness of the vitality in all things. The piece explores the entanglement of life forces and influences that run through and across bodies, both human and non-human. The title comes from the work of Edouard Glissant, for whom écho-monde referenced a world of things resonating with one another.

Edouard Glissant wrote: ‘what is totality, once again, and through return, if not the relation of each matter to all others?' (Glissant, 2009: 16).

110cm x 75cm x 85cm

Mixed media inc horsehair, wood, linen and wool.

Studio response to feelings one Thursday morning.

DOOR Creative Studio re-purposes vacant and underused buildings in Amsterdam and turns them into spaces for creative projects.

During her time at DOOResidency Nicola Turner developed a serious of works that related both to each other and the factory’s architectural repetitive structures. There emerged an unfolding narrative, with hints of the domestic, that cut through the space in a diagonal, contrasting with the square grid formations of the columns. This generated a sense of movement, almost of procession. The materials used conversed with the decaying shell of the former factory as the dust of each merged together. The sculptural pieces entwined, dragged, clung, and grasped to this vast found space.

The programme was curated by Aleksandra Wojt

# 91 Peer Sessions @ Chisenhale CritsPast - 2pm Sat 11th Dec 2021

Chisenhale Gallery, London E3

chisenhale.org.uk

During Rindon Johnson's exhibition Law of Large Numbers: Our Selves at Chisenhale Gallery (6 Nov 2021 - 6 Feb 2022) and in response to the artist’s ongoing interest in the pedagogical framework of the ‘artist group crit’, a series of artist-led crits were programmed over the course of his exhibition at Chisenhale Gallery.⁠

Peer Sessions and esteemed guest peer artist Harold Offeh were invited to lead a Chisenhale Crit open to the public, discussing the work of two artists with the assembled group.

Prior to the event, artists were invited to submit their work to take part in the crit, with two artists selected by the Chisenhale team and Peer Sessions. Nicola Turner and Esther Gatón were chosen to present their work for feedback.

Nicola Turner presented two recent works for discussion, Écho-Monde, an installation in Wells Cathedral (mixed media inc horsehair, wool and coir) and Anatomy of Melancholy (mixed media inc horsehair, coir and wood, 140cm x 110cm x 85cm), alongside a display of the materials used for each. The conversation ranged from interpretations of the sculptures as bodily, organic and tentacular, to ideas about the juxtaposition of the domestic realm and the sci-fi look of the materials.

Esther Gatón presented a new short film titled Curtain Twitcher. The discussion elicited a broad range of responses, from ideas of Kafka's Castle, to urban alienation, gentrification and the concept of the female protagonist as Flâneur.

At our Slaughterford Mill Open Studio event in July I was joined by Clare Whistler who did a performance response to my work. They moved around the space interacting to my sculptures, my space and my material.

Following the event Whistler shared with me these words……..

1.

Slow sink head first

Soft smell fumes overpower

Face down

Head down

Sink

Curves catch

And dissipate

Volumes

Shapes change

Hug hold hatch hitch

Slow suspend

Feel the weight

Of solitary

Depth

Loom over

In

Around

Give in

To…

Amorphizing

Eye drift

Ears attend

Slow wave

Of sliding

Flesh-wool

Heavy limb sea

Slow down breath breath

Held breath

Sleep sink slink

Slumber

Head heavy headless

2.

Sticky plant and nettles

Cow parsley weir flow

Water

Red Burnett moth

Green greens - still searching for the 50 words for green

That aren’t there

Outside this frame/window

A burgeon world

In here a majesty of vision

The vortex vortices tile floor leading from the door

To an unnended place

Why doesn’t it reach door to door

Opening to opening

Its not leading one through

Its leading one in

Window at front carries its own sky

Warped faded paint behind its own window

Two views of sky while inside

One is led inward

To the hearth to the stone

To the oven

Its own face leading us in

With rough skin its easter island stature

Focuses us to fire- outside water

Air this air is the smell

then what we confront

Or meet

Is earth

Many sorts of earth

Things one might not name earth

Sheep’s wool horse hair wooden furniture clay glaze

This mind is earthing itself

Going into materiality

To wager with imagination

Growing changing

Uncomfortable

Human plant-al vegetal forms

Are we in

Or watching

Do we recoil or start with recognition

I am like you

Making my way

In

Making

My way

In

3.

Moved so long in abject melancholy understood flow

so mesmerising I cant say where I have been

I have been

held and bodied

Flown and stretched

Dipped and shifted

Breathing in and out

Buried head stop breath all focus

Into inside

Flow of dogs all unsettled

I répond to Vibrant Material

That I am just material and this is just material

Black and brown and natural

And saved old and new

To be with lumps and legs to feel the source and muddle

Liquid clay - but not

Its its own world

The smell so dense

The air is almost material

My eyes shut

So often its a dream state

Of hearing

And body responding

Mixed Media inc Horsehair, Clay, Wax, Found objects, Dog hair, Human hair and Ceramic.

135cm x 135cm x 450cm

Vital Mortality was exhibited at the 14th International Conference on the Social Context of Death, Dying and Disposal, University of Bath in September, 2019.

Turner explores the interconnection of life and death, human and non-human, attraction and repulsion. She has found resonance in the concept of the abject, the capacity of the world to disorient and connect to primal instinct. Her research has led her to experience an abattoir, a cadaver course and a personal ritual burial. What interests Turner is the dissolution of boundaries and looking at the in-between-ness of things. There is increasing recognition that humans are ecosystems that exchange and overlap with other ecosystems, not bounded by skin or death. Vital Mortality combines found objects that hold traces of memory, materials from organic ‘dead’ matter (e.g horsehair) and the shapes of human form. It explores the interconnection of humans to objects and each other and the awareness of death, as a way of affirming life forces, amidst confusion and the unsettled. Supported by the Bath Spa University Harbutt Fund.

“I just wanted to say, on behalf of the DDD14 organising team, a huge thank you for your installation at the Conference last week. I think that your sculpture, combined with the art work in the foyer, added a really interesting dimension to the conference which was hugely beneficial for all our delegates.” Emma Ford, University of Bath.

“I really think your artwork helped transform the space and create a unique atmosphere for the conference.” Tara Jessop, University of Bath

Winter Sculpture Park

Gallery no32

Old Bexley, London

150cm x 150cm x 140cm

Mixed media inc hair, coir, wool and nylon

This Mortal Coir explores the wider systems and influences that run through and across bodies, both human and non-human, vitalising all. It combines materials from repurposed ‘dead’ matter (e.g., horsehair, coir) and the shapes of organic forms while embracing a living tree.

WSP32 2021 Catalogue

87cm x 30cm x 22cm

Unfired Clay and Paint

In Judith Butler’s book Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, she writes: “Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies ‘are’”. In Study One and Study Two I have drawn bodies out from the clay while letting them also disappear within it. Biological engineers, from Cornell University, report that clay, a seemingly infertile blend of minerals, might have been the birthplace of life on Earth, or at least of the complex biochemicals that make life possible.

This Mortal Coir

WINNER OF ASHBURNER PRIZE 2021

see video link here

The piece explores the wider interconnected ecosystems that run through and across bodies, both human and non human, vitalising all. Interconnected systems hold regenerative power, their components creating the parts that create the components that create the parts. Awareness of the interconnectedness of all living beings is becoming mainstream within science.

Annual Sculpture Exhibition and Ashburner Prize

1st June – 31st Oct 2021

Video of install

The 2021 selection panel was led by artist and Royal Academician Peter Randall-Page and Lara Goodman, contemporary art curator at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

The 2021 exhibition was entitled regeneration, reflecting life beyond COVID19 and celebrating the start of planting in the ‘new arboretum’ area.

91cm x 32cm x 25cm

Unfired Clay and Paint

In Judith Butler’s book Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”, she writes: “Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves, but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies ‘are’”. In Study One and Study Two I have drawn bodies out from the clay while letting them also disappear within it. Biological engineers, from Cornell University, report that clay, a seemingly infertile blend of minerals, might have been the birthplace of life on Earth, or at least of the complex biochemicals that make life possible.

Mixed media including horsehair, coir and steel.

190cm x 132cm x 65cm

George Bataille writes of the cultural shame of filth, sexual function and death and how our “horror of nature” is linked to the fantasy of independence. I am interested in the dissolution of these boundaries and looking at the in-betweeness of things, exploring how humans are ecosystems that exchange and overlap with other ecosystems, not bounded by skin or death. My work and methodology have both been looking at challenging individuality and creating awareness of the wider interconnected energies of which we are a part.

The mattress was given to me by my friend Léopoldine Hugo. The title comes from a collection of poetry by Victor Hugo, about memory, written in homage to his daughter Léopoldine Hugo who drowned in the seine.

100cm x 100cm x 107cm

Wood, coir fibre, horse hair, copper and mixed media.

Abject Chair took inspiration from Jane Bennet’s book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, in which she theorizes a "vital materiality" that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. I found resonance with her research into how objects have their own vitality linked to the other energies that have been around them.

Mixed media with horsehair and rubber

180cm x 75cm x 50cm

I am interested in using found material and objects including those that have personal associations to me, for example in The Mysterious Mother, 2019 I have used a horsehair mattress that was passed from my great great aunt, to my great aunt, to my brother and then to me. Mattresses have associations with sex, death and life. The detritus that I am drawn to is often “dead” matter including hair. I explore how these materials give off energy forces that provoke different ways of looking. In The Mysterious Mother the rubber gloves create a juxtaposition with the hair and introduce uncomfortable resonances of sexuality, childbirth and intrusive medical examinations.

Clay, matt glaze, gloss glaze

60cm x 20cm x 17cm

The passion found in the interconnection of bodies and body parts has been a recurring theme in my work. I allude to both how the human form comes from the non-human and reverts to the non-human and how, in living, forms merge with other forms and surroundings. The materials in Non-Dual are 'dead' matter but once were 'Life' for example clay being the product of fossilised living things.

Clay, Matt Glaze, Gloss Glaze

27cm x 23cm x 20cm 

Clay, Gloss Glaze

33cm x 26cm x 20cm 

In Nexus, I allude both to how the human form comes from the non-human and reverts to the non-human and how, in living, forms merge with other forms and surroundings. The materials in Nexus are 'dead' matter but once were classified as ‘alive’, clay being the product of fossilised living things. I consider clay, even now, to be not separable from life.

Copper and Brass powder on cotton

152 x 111 x 4cm

Turner created this piece using a floor cloth used in a production of King Lear. Her interest is in the traces of the 104 performances left on the cloth and questioning what the cloth absorbed both of the language and the interaction with the performers and what the material absorbed of the emotion and the universal themes of the play.