LONDON.- Turner creates sculptures and site-responsive installations that explore fundamental dichotomies: life and death, human and non-human, attraction and repulsion. Using “dead” materials such as horsehair and wool alongside found objects, her works touch upon the history and “memory” of materials, dissolving boundaries amid the interconnectedness of ecosystems.
With a background in set and costume design, Turner completed an MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University in 2019 and in 2023 founded FORM-ica, an independent collective of artists in her hometown of Bath. She gained attention in 2024 for her site-responsive installation The Meddling Fiend which interacted with the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Courtyard of the Royal Academy, London, for the duration of the Summer Exhibition.
Turner’s works possess an animalistic quality, with tentacle-like elements that weave around and interact with their surroundings, much like a plant reaching for sunlight. Re-purposed antique furniture legs, kitchen bowls and forks, binoculars and clamps become anthropomorphic feet, hands or eyes, giving her freestanding sculptures a precarious, animated presence. The works tend to be dark both literally and metaphorically. Encased in hand-sewn mesh, the materials - once part of living creatures – draw upon Turner’s own experience of loss, bereavement and medical intrusions. This lends her work a visceral, unsettling power, evoking both attraction and repulsion, and inviting new ways of seeing.
Yet within this unease lies an affirmation of life and the possibility of renewal. The so-called “dead” matter, for Turner, is animated with history and memory. Horsehair - historically used in mattresses and furniture – bears traces of human lives and interaction. Turner’s mother was a furniture restorer, so these materials that are synonymous with her visual language are inherent to Turner’s own lived experience and generational story. By choosing, and indeed re-using materials that have had a previous “life”, her work reminds us of our entanglement with our surroundings and the wider interconnected energies of which we are a part.
Recent exhibitions include Fabric of Undoing, Carvalho Park Gallery, New York (2025); Spinning A Yarn, Abbey Barn, Glastonbury (2024); The Uninvited Guest from the Unremembered Past, National Trust, Tyntesfield (2024); Fragile, Bomb Factory Art Foundation, Marylebone, London (2024); We Are for The Dark, 195 Mare Street, Hackney, London (2023); The Uninvited Guest from the Unremembered Past, The Chapter House, Wells Art Contemporary, Somerset (2023); Echoed Ecstasy, Od Arts Festival, Somerset (2023); Norwich Art Path, Sainsbury Centre & Norwich Castle Museum, Norfolk (2023); Myth and Miasma, Skaftfell Centre for Visual Arts, Iceland (2022); Stone Lane Gardens Sculpture Exhibition, Dartmoor, where she won the Ashburner Prize. Turner was the recipient of the RWA Academy Award in 2024.
In June 2025, Turner will present Danse Macabre, a 10-metre-high, site-specific installation at Art Basel’s Unlimited. In 2026, Annely Juda Fine Art will host Turner’s first solo exhibition.
