DATE: 31-10-24
TIME: 12:24
AUTHOR: SAM HARDING
STUDIO PHOTOGRAPHY: ALEKS FAUST
DESIGNER: YUSUF S. BOZKURT
IMAGE COUNT: 13
TAGS: Non-Human Intelligece, Architectonics, Freight
It seems fitting that I first encountered them online. Conveyed through the fleck and fingerprints of my laptop screen, and the resolution protocols of its pixel-count trying to burnish or render them in some legible way, on first and second glance these strange forms simply would not make visual sense to me. It was as if they were resisting their own disembodiment, the digital substitution of clarity for proximity, insisting instead on some elusive materiality or quality of presence, lying in wait in their patch of internet, infesting a simple Squarespace web-page accessed by clicking a box marked ‘Enter’.
Most of the images bear the real-estate hallmarks of your typical artist portfolio, set against white-cubes and brutalist concrete. Meanwhile some of their subjects are draped down stairwells, nestled in crumbling stone walls, suspended in trees, or even enveloping a human body. The oil-dark examples recur in a nightmarish taxonomy of shapes and sizes, while the milky-pale ones come across as distorted snakes for far too long, the eye unfixed by their bodies of marbled, piled musculature. Like the lo-fi grain of soil on screen, these forms possess textures that enact themselves on the other side of the camera, in a sustained effect that sees them appearing at once arboreal, rock-like, scaly, resinous, dead, alive, and a hive of in-betweens. Descriptions mutate. They are mortal-coils, varicose limbs, and, increasingly, fully-formed entities, emanating and ballooning with tendrils, equal in scale even to the buildings that often host them.
And then, in person, up close, the sculptures of Nicola Turner do something else. They come apart. Which is to say, they are quickly revealed as being formed from bunches of wool and horse-hair stuffed into netting, an anticlimactic understanding that lies about as still as a room full of bulbous, knotty, woollen tendrils waiting to be choreographed into ever-more contradictory shapes. Because even in their fully-grasped state, these “objects” are no less unfamiliar, never fully surreal but always disquieting in their actual composition, evoking, in this interplay of raw and woven fibres, a constantly shifting state of gathering and unspooling, form and formlessness, science and fiction. This brings to mind Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, in which the sci-fi author proposes an object oriented ontology for the genre, one whose materials are the stalk of wheat or piece of string, the mundane threads and particles of our daily lives, rewritten as the anthropological artefacts of an alien planet.
This kind of space-craft is on full display when I visit Turner’s FORM-ica studio in Bath. A converted warehouse now shared and compartmentalised with various art practices, the section occupied by Turner is bright and airy, strewn with pot-plants and wooden partitions. The evidence of its recent renovation is all a scintilla of concrete dust, exposed girders and peeling paint, but suffice it to say that the building’s sheddings evoke a very different atmosphere alongside the occasional jar of harvested human skin cells, not least the looming mass of Turner’s dark tendrils as they spill out of canvas sacks and pile up high in one supernatural corner. Not yet divided and arranged into separate beings, instead in this gestalt they seem to occupy a state between structure and adornment, or the forest floor and some idea of insulation without bodies or buildings, or differences between the two. The twin impulses of disturbance and recognition that they inspire is latent within their corpse-like stillness, but somehow seeing them like this affords a vantage on the range of hybridities that they embody at a base material level.
This tangle of affects triggered greatly comes down to Turner’s inspired use of animal hair, a material that can already belie categorisation in its raw, unprocessed state, but which is also the site of some more complex, inhuman associations. “Hair off the body is abject compared to hair on the body,” elaborates Turner, describing how this abjection is based on a need to shore up some distinction between living and dead matter, as well as preserve a sense of the body as a discrete, intact silo of human life, hair follicles and all. In some ways, what this also illustrates is how, whether human or animal, it is the smoothness and softness that hair typically represents that is being exposed by the sudden impression of hair as, in fact, ‘hairy’. In the case of Turner’s sculptures and their doubled textures, constantly fluctuating between lamina and fur, hairy and soft, creature and comfort, this volatility becomes the antechamber to intense, unpredictable reactions. “Some people want to hug them, some people don’t even want to touch them,” she continues. “[They] can get really overwhelmed. I think amassing material together that has such agency does provoke different responses in different ways.”
Perched on a shelf nearby is one of her most personified pieces, titled Klipp und Klapp. This figure rises on three branched legs, each culminating in a pair of old sheep-shearing scissors upon which it stands. It has a mane of ‘hair’ all its own, textured differently to the rest of its body, engulfing what would be its face over hunched, sorrowful shoulders. Below the shelf is a sack of unprocessed black wool, flowing with irregular colours and frayed micro-tendrils. This is the structural spectrum that Turner’s various pieces occupy, one that finds itself in constant flux as she gathers and releases her materials from their netting, sending them out into the world to make uncommon forms of contact.
The German Architect Gottfried Semper once proposed a definition of architecture that eschewed its claims to permanence and fixity, comparing it instead to the act of weaving; the assemblage of temporary, ambulant textiles. This definition resounds across the site specific responses that constitute the majority of Turner’s work with these tendrils, as she is invited to place them in conversation with structures and landscapes across Europe. These sites are often registered buildings or natural reserves, two ends of another spectrum that are each nevertheless figured as somehow more or less permanent than the other, with this as a particular brand of tension that Turner’s interventions often bring into focus. Her tendrils wind up pillars and nest in trees, scaffolding what is intact and simulating what is natural before withdrawing, morphing once more into digital images with their own collapsible definitions of ephemerality and permanence. But there is perhaps no better picture of this transience than the one Turner provides in her account of travelling with a carry-on suitcase full of tendrils, ready to respond to whatever space she finds herself in with a tentacular punctuation mark. Needless to say she’s frequently delayed at the airport baggage X-rays.
We spend most of the afternoon speaking about tentacles. Tendrils. Already a category of noun that sends a probing streamer through the mind, like a bioluminescent trail across an expanse of darkness. A word-image that hints at the presence of other senses, or even consciousnesses, intersecting with your own. Before our interview, Turner directed me to a conversation between Donna Haraway and Martha Kenney, titled Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene. In it, Haraway describes tendrils as powerful symbols of alterity, things that challenge our anthropocentric perspective while also representing the potential for knotty, visceral forms of knowledge. One expression of this is what she quotes Eva Hayward as calling ‘the haptic visual’, a sensory mode in which our equation of sight as something that reinforces an analytical distance is subverted, replaced by a state of “not looking from afar but actually being part of something”.
The way this figures in Turner’s sculpted works becomes a kind of freight, one that engages the viewer to experience their presence as equally felt and phantom. “It’s almost as though the artwork is kind of feelers, feeling its way around a space or around an object. And I think people really relate to it probably, by looking at it and imagining that touch or that way of exploring or feeling a space.” As our conversation continues I find myself cultivating a different awareness of the building we are in, specifically the dark, musty corners I would not usually go over and stand in. Picturing myself lying in those nooks, or something lying there that is me, becomes a second-hand sensation of detritus, coldness and wall-climbing. This image is not a linear procession of reaching out, touching and shifting, but one that itself corresponds to saccades of the eye, the unfurling of some multi-directional, mycelial bloom.
The symbol of the tentacle takes on newly literal implications in an era of scientific papers bearing Lovecraftian titles such as ROBOTIC TENTACLES WITH THREE-DIMENSIONAL MOBILITY BASED ON FLEXIBLE ELASTOMERS. This example in particular proposes the attachment of tools to these appendages, such as cameras or needle injectors, asserting a kind of Swiss-army-knife efficiency that tentacles can also represent in their dexterous plasticity, offering a blueprint for versions of techno-humanism that anticipate our crooked limbs replaced by Octopus™ prosthetics. And yet essential to the deftness of these chthonic body parts is the way they can be said to possess minds of their own. This agency is expressed at the level of their individual neuromuscular receptors, which can respond to stimuli independently of one another, and extends to the image of multiple arms engaged in different, even conflicting activities, in a decentralisation of individual control that strikes at both contemporary anxieties surrounding Artificial Intelligence, and which ultimately shadows our reliance on technology itself. These are broad generalisations made here lightly, if only to acknowledge how fundamentally ambiguous tentacles are, and yet how they can therefore serve to illuminate and embody the ways in which we are intrinsically bound up in worlds and beings both outside of ourselves, and within.
Turner’s tendrils enact the shape-shifting versatility of their form, adapting to the different scales and contexts in which they are placed, and yet lining this morphology of distributed mass and intelligence is the impression of an overwhelming, almost crippling sensitivity, one that is felt up and down the entire surface area of their limbs. As such they appear both physically and emotionally riddled by their surroundings, a porousness that ultimately forms part of their actual life-cycles. Turner re-uses the materials from each of her installations, taking some of the previous landscape into the next, unwinding an interconnected web of different materials and ecosystems. The rawness of this process also characterises their melancholic presence in these spaces. “The material has certain similarities wherever it is. Part of it is that hanging on, clinging, creeping round, not wanting to let go”. Encountering them as they drape down ceilings and lurk in their corners and crevices, it can feel as if they’re only traces themselves, the unprocessed residue of grief, pain, fear or just memory, in a mute dialogue with preserved environments that often feel frozen in the stillness of their own histories. This too characterises their bunched, coiled aspect, simulating a heaviness that mimics the psychic weight of scar tissue. When I picture them in my mind, they are always alone; the attics and corridors of the manors are empty; the white cubes have faded into oblivion. Even as figures rendered solitary by expanses of nature, curled up in a forest or valley, they seem to bear the silhouette of something that might once have happened there, long ago, as when wasps form nests around the shape of a fissure or skull. And yet unlike a memento mori, in which graves and skeletons and digital pyramids might serve as sober reminders that we will one day be gone, these strangers convey such an absence in terms that are alien to our inscriptions and memorials, as if figuring death from a perspective beyond our own, a world haunted only by the memory of human beings.
In Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulhucene, Donna Haraway narrates our collective inheritance— the civilisational sum of our presence upon the earth— as one beset by colonial violence, ecological devastation and the sheer mass of industrialised consumption, describing it as an obscene weight. She extols the importance of living with a visceral awareness of this weight in order to address it both practically and mentally, where both measures entail not only a programme of harm-reduction and restoration, but the wholesale rejection of the terms of our earthly presence set by capital in favour of those set by nature. In this vein, the Anthropocene stands as a sort of cursed banner, urgently articulating the scope of destruction wrought by industrial capitalism while at the same time tying it to the self-regard of a species naming a geological epoch after itself. By shedding these grand narratives of human exceptionalism, the natural cycles that Harraway describes can be grasped as the powerful, complex and fundamentally ambivalent forces that overarch our existence, rather than obstacles to be overcome by the prevailing techno-solutionist doctrine of the present. Because such an ideology, one that regards death, pain and even possession of a body as problems to be conquered, is ultimately founded on fears even greater than those that may arise through embracing a mortality that is rather fluid, microscopic, biologically unstable, and whose ambiguities might be woven into the fabric of everyday life.
“I really am fascinated by the transition between life and death,” says Turner, speaking with a quiet animation about the microbiomes and bacterial flora that already constitute the non-human part of our body, whether it is alive or not. “With the thought about being bound to everything around us, you lose that sense of being alive or dead.” Her tendrils are dense with these high notes of despair, death, extinction and historical gravity, and yet once again it is in their merest elements, their rootlike aspect, that they bring these abstract universals back down to earth, to our lives and senses, and to a materialism both rote and remarkable, something that begins with wool they are made from. “I can’t remember who said this,” continues Turner, “but if someone invented wool as a fibre now, they’d get a Nobel Prize. If you look at how each fibre’s built up, they’re fire-retardant; you can crush it and it springs back; it doesn’t maintain odour; it’s 100% sustainable, recyclable, biodegradable. It keeps you warm in winter, cool in summer. Lots of people have probably tried to recreate it as a man-made fibre and never succeeded in matching it.”
Sheep were domesticated 9000 years ago, an evolutionary history that infuses the smell of lanolin, of sheep’s wool, and which in Turner’s sculptures becomes another tendril in the room, seeking out memories of childhood through what can only be described as an mammalian odour. Some people can’t get enough of it. Others recoil. In any case the exhibition space becomes activated by a shiver of submerged associations, whether in the lingering shape of creatures that used to live in the curtains of our childhood bedrooms, or in the primordial aroma of domesticated beasts shot through with the pattern recognition of snakelike predators. Of course life and art isn’t all contextualised in the subconscious, and Turner herself is candid about the traumatic experiences that give her tendrils their twisted shapes. She sits besides a loose net of horse-hair as she speaks, running her fingers through their seams and uncovering the clotted ephemera within. “In my own history I’ve been cut up a lot and stitched back together, you know, and it’s really therapeutic just picking the little bits out.”
A few years ago, Turner completed an MA in Fine Art at Bath university, in what was both the beginning of her sculptural practice and a departure from decades spent realising a highly-successful career in designing sets for theatrical productions. This background might inform her penchant for working at large scales, given the size of some of her recent installations, but it also hosted some more inchoate designs towards the fabrication of interactive, almost living environments, including one set that needed to be constantly doused with water in order to achieve a consistent spread of rust. Her transition into site-specific sculptures has opened up a vast new scope for this kind of world-building, while realising ambitions and skills that she has possessed since she was young.
Both Turner’s mother and grandmother taught her to sew, forming part of a childhood in which upholstery tools and vintage furniture loomed large. So when she came across an old chair in a skip during the course of her Fine Art degree, its horse-hair stuffing blossoming out of it, the discovery of a material so light and flexible that she could manipulate, stuff, squeeze and essentially transform into anything she desired, also came with a hidden thread of personal weight. Her first piece was another chair, one almost entirely consumed by a thick spiral of its horse-hair guts. Since then the majority of her sculptures have retained this connection to their past-lives as objects, spilling and snaking from table-legs and skeletal frames that lash them back to a more fragile, encumbered reality. Although Turner now sources most of her materials directly from sheep farms; old chairs, sofas and mattresses have continued to provide this direct connection to a host of other lives and histories that imbue these domestic objects and the many inheritances they hold. Re-animated as tendrils, these traces are given a new relationship to the past, an afterlife that enacts, as manifested in the skin cells that Turner collects from these aged mattresses, how our presence is not reducible to the material particles that comprise us.
Even before her tendrils found their form, Turner had found herself drawn to producing shadowy figures on canvas, adding murky textures to their surface, searching for some way to lift them off of the page. This intention recently came full circle when she was invited by the Royal Academy of Arts in London to develop a sculptural intervention in their central courtyard for the duration of its Summer Exhibition earlier this year. The subject to which her tendrils would be responding was none other than Sir Joshua Reynolds, an 18th century painter and one of the art institution’s founders, whose statue raises a paintbrush aloft outside of the building’s palatial halls. Although best known for his portraiture, Turner was drawn to Reynolds’ fantastical depiction of the infant Hercules, who lies strangling a pair of serpents in his cradle whilst surrounded by a draped retinue of figures, a scene that is at once radiant with celestial light and yet whose many walls and bodies are swallowed up into a clouded, swirling darkness. This shadowy matter would come to find itself spirited beyond its frame in what was easily Turner’s largest creation yet; a pillared entity that emerges from Sir Joshua’s paintbrush into a vast plume of coursing tendrils that rise and writhe into a series of arched contours, forming a bower through which visitors can walk. Shadowing this spectacular vision is another painting by Reynolds that was recently the subject of news headlines, when conservationists uncovered a crouched, ‘meddling fiend’ hidden beneath the painted shadows, now an estranged visitor to our present. At the time of its creation this imp was deemed worthy of censure not for its portent of depression and despair, but for being too literal a metaphor, a tasteless figment in what was considered the refined and nuanced period of enlightenment. Times have surely changed.
I went to go see Turner’s Meddling Fiend during the brisk, early months of a grey summer. People roamed around it, gathering its many angles together. Many took photos, sending it up into the cloud. There were puddles on the ground, and I inhaled deeply, the tendrils re-infesting the air with the rain still dampening their surface. Later, stepping back out into the city, I looked up at the clouded skyline. The Shard was being engulfed.