Nicola Turner’s practice is profoundly ecological. She works with waste material—mainly raw, untreated wool—and reuses it wherever possible. The wool is often sourced from where she lives or where she has been invited to work and/or exhibit, and she employs it, in combination with horsehair, wood, metal, and other recycled materials, to make large-scale, site-responsive forms that take over and transform their surroundings.
According to Niall Hobhouse (Drawing Matter, June 2023), any work of art in any medium can articulate an architectural idea, where the “…architectural encompasses all spatial events generated by intentional human intervention to include aspects of landscape and urban design, theater, and performance.” This is a useful way of thinking about Turner’s work, which can be related to that of Louise Bourgeois and Bracha Ettinger in conceptual and psychological terms while taking us somewhere else formally. There is also a link to Peter Randall-Page’s idea of “physical knowledge, connecting us as part of everything…and [to] the stories of the past and the future.”
Regardless of individual interpretation, Turner’s work conjures a suggestion of living matter. Its sense of continuity, and concomitant physical responsiveness, is clear not only in the forms themselves, but also in the rearrangement of the same work according to location. It’s not necessarily the gallery or room that is altered; it can be the artwork itself.
Penny Florence: A word that keeps occurring to me in relation to your work is “koan,” which approximates to living with paradox and letting go of binary thinking.
Nicola Turner: That word resonates with me. When people look at my work, sometimes they ask what it is. I ask invigilators to reply by asking viewers for their own responses, because their reactions can be very different if you give them a bit more time with the work, to think and to feel. They’ll start to say things like, “Oh, this has triggered memories of my dreams when I was a kid,” or “Enticing, like a magical cave. And fearsome, like a shaded place of danger and toxicity in a fairy tale.” Laughter and fear: it gets into a much more interesting conversation than if somebody tries to laugh it off or put it in a box. . .
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