Nicola Turner

Nicola Turner is an artist known for creating large-scale visceral installations from wool and waste horsehair, often made in response to their surroundings. This summer her site-responsive installation The Meddling Field interacted with the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Courtyard of the Royal Academy, London for the duration of the Summer Exhibition. With a background in set and costume design, she graduated from Central St Martins School of Art & Design and has designed for The Royal Opera House, San Francisco Opera, Scottish Ballet, Royal Shakespeare Company and Sydney Opera House where she was the recipient of a Green Room Award. In 2019 she completed a MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University. She was recently awarded the RWA Academy Award for her sculpture Klipp und Klapp. 

Description of talk
In her work, Nicola Turner 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 prompt new ways of looking. 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. Turner will share her experiences of working with these materials.

Find out more and follow Nicola Turner:
www.nicolaturner.art

@nicolaturner.art