COVER STORY · JUNE 2026
In dialogue with Nicola Turner
FVTVRIST Magazine // Text by Elina P.
1 June 2026
Contemporary sculpture has increasingly moved away from the production of objects and toward the cultivation of relationships: between bodies and landscapes, histories and materials, presence and absence. Few artists embody this shift as compellingly as Nicola Turner. Working with horsehair, wool, reclaimed matter, and organic remnants, Turner constructs immersive environments that resist permanence and challenge the notion of sculpture as a fixed form. Instead, her works exist in a state of continual transformation, accumulating histories as they travel from one site to another, carrying traces of previous lives while remaining open to new encounters.
At the heart of Turner's practice lies a profound inquiry into material agency. Her sculptures invite us to reconsider the boundaries that have long structured Western thought: human and non-human, living and non-living, attraction and repulsion, growth and decay. Hair detached from the body, wool removed from the animal, fragments of forgotten domestic interiors and industrial histories are reactivated within complex ecological systems of meaning. Matter, in Turner's hands, is never passive. It remembers, absorbs, transforms, and persists. The resulting installations occupy a space that is simultaneously visceral and poetic, where vulnerability becomes a form of resistance and impermanence emerges as a condition of life itself.
As FVTVRIST's Cover Story, this conversation unfolds at a pivotal moment in the artist's career, coinciding with Time's Scythe at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and her forthcoming solo exhibition at Annely Juda. Moving between questions of mortality, ecology, female experience, and material memory, Turner reveals a practice that does not seek to resolve contradictions but rather to inhabit them. What emerges is a vision of sculpture as a living field of relations, one that asks not what matter is, but what it continues to become.
Spinning A Yarn, Abbey Barn, Glastonbury.
© Maxwell Attenborough. Courtesy of the artist.
Nicola Turner in Studio. © Aleks Faust. Courtesy of the artist.
You spent over two decades designing sets for ballet, opera and theatre before shifting to sculpture. That’s not a small pivot. What (and if) did the stage give you that you carried with you into your new practice?
I initially trained as a theatre designer and worked internationally including with the Sydney Opera House, Royal Shakespeare Company and Scottish Ballet. I went back to university as a mature student, to do an MA in Fine Art, graduating in 2019. My previous career has given me many transferrable skills including an understanding of working at scale, structural engineering, materials and knowledge of model making, scale drawings, deadlines and spatial awareness.
With theatre design I was serving the scripts, whereas with sculpture I work intuitively and let my work take form by exploring materials, found objects, personal response and lived experience, often connecting to my subconscious. When creating large scale freestanding work, I use structures to support my material, so some planning happens in advance, but I always leave room for the final shape to emerge while installing. It is important to me to leave space for my work to emerge in the process rather than being mapped out before.
THE MEDDLING FIEND, Royal Academy, London, 2024
© Maxwell Attenborough. Courtesy of the artist.
Your materials are what you call “dead”: horsehair, wool, organic matter that has already lived its life elsewhere. You visited an abattoir during your MA to ask workers at what point death occurs, and they couldn’t answer. Does that unresolvable question still drive the work?
Yes, it does. I often describe my work as exploring the seeming dichotomy of life and death and their connections. I am fascinated by the embedded memories in material. I collect horsehair from old furniture and mattresses and think about the histories and stories the material has absorbed, not only while on the horse but also as its time as domestic furniture. I explore how hair/fleece off the body continues to have a vitality and life beyond its original purpose of providing warmth to an animal.
I am interested in how we connect to our surroundings, how we house billions of “non-human” bacteria in our gut, which influence our emotions, our thoughts, our body shape. And we are learning how these bacteria can carry patterns across generations. The links between and across what we might assume to be the living and non-living are much more complex than they seem. I have been influenced by Jane Bennett’s book on “Vibrant Matter”. Bennett theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman.
Portrait in front of THE MEDDLING FIEND, Royal Academy, London, 2024.
© Maxwell Attenborough. Courtesy of the artist.
FABRIC OF UNDOING, Carvalho, New York, 2025.
© Carvalho, New York. Courtesy of the gallery.
Your installations are constantly reinvested: tendrils from one work reappear in the next. That’s an unusual relationship to the finished object. What does it mean for a sculpture to never quite be finished or final?
I create tendrils from wool and horsehair that I prepare in my studio and then use on site to twist together, responding to the architectural or natural landscape that I am working in. When an exhibition comes to the end, I unpick the tendrils, repair them and then use them again, responding to a new environment. Firstly, I enjoy the fact that the tendrils absorb new stories from each context and that the repairs show evidence of their previous incarnations. Secondly, in the climate emergency that we live in, I think it is important to be able to reuse material. This way of working results in minimal waste at the end of the exhibition as I can collect the material and use it to create something completely different. I do make smaller works, with wool that has been more processed and cleaned and these are pieces that I don’t intend to unpick. But it is the large installations that drive my practice and the way in which they are unfinished, as you say, is important. I believe the way they are made mirrors some of the themes the works explore, the boundaries across life and death, as we were just saying, between human and non-human, between attraction and repulsion. I hope viewers don’t have a finished response to the works.
You founded FORM-ica, a collective based in a disused factory in Bath. What does working within a community of artists do for a practice that deals with such solitary and bodily themes?
Being part of an artist’s collective cannot be underestimated. In my journey to calling myself an artist, having my own studio was a really significant moment, a marker of a commitment to my practice perhaps. So, it feels important to me to be able to offer studio spaces and there is a lot of need for artist spaces in Bath. We have a big table in a communal area and the unplanned sharing of lunches and experiences, or spontaneous conversations over a cup of tea are part of what sustains me as an artist. We open the studio twice a year and have a yard party, along with the other factory units on the site. So far, we have always had big numbers, of all ages, and I love the sense of this wider community also, engaging in art. I am also part of Bath Art Depot, a collective of artists, architects, curators, and artist-educators who live in Bath. The collective’s aim is to develop an arts and cultural hub that brings together the vibrant, yet dispersed, creative community living and working in the city. Bath Art Depot host talks at FORM-ica, in the communal space.
I OFTEN DESCRIBE MY WORK AS EXPLORING THE SEEMING DICHOTOMY OF LIFE AND DEATH AND THEIR CONNECTIONS.
I AM FASCINATED BY THE EMBEDDED MEMORIES IN MATERIAL.
Time’s Scythe uses pale wool for the first time, a deliberate departure from your darker work. What prompted that shift, and what does the lighter material allow that the dark couldn’t?
In the Yorkshire Sculpture Park flocks of white sheep graze amongst the sculptures during the spring and summer seasons. I felt it important to allow myself to respond directly to that context so sourced wool local to YSP. The work that sits in the vestry is made from the wool of sheep that grazed the YSP estate. I have been using paler wool in some of my smaller works for a while and so was excited to have the opportunity to try it on a larger scale. The white seemed perhaps appropriate to the sacred space of a Chapel, less threatening than my darker works while also disrupting the peace.
The work begins outside the Chapel, spilling from the bell tower, entering through a window before inhabiting the nave. How did the architecture of that specific building shape what the installation became?
The Chapel is a magnificent building. It was built in the Classical style and of ashlar sandstone. The huge windows let in incredible light throughout the day. My installation disrupts the space and explores the different openings and draws attention to often overlooked areas of the space. Due to the work coming through the Bell Tower, the trap door is left opened, meaning visitors can see up into it, perhaps for the first time.
Built in 1744 by Sir William Wentworth, the Chapel was dedicated to St Bartholomew. As patron saint of butchers, surgeons and shoemakers, among others, he is associated with cutting. Responding to the site I felt I wanted to cut through the building from the outside by taking my tendrils up the outside, through the bell tower window, falling down internally, spilling out over the gallery and reaching, almost with claws, towards the altar window through which the morning light pours in. A further connection to the architecture was to the Andy Goldsworthy Sheep Pen that sits just below the Chapel. This is still used for shearing every year.
Fabric of Undoing, installation view, Carvalho, New York, 2025.
© Carvalho, New York. Courtesy of the gallery.
The sheep shears at the tips of each tendril connect the work to the landscape around YSP, to West Yorkshire’s textile industry, to the sheep grazing outside. How important is it to you that the work is rooted in the specific ecology of where it is shown?
First used in the iron age, sprung loaded sheep shears are still in use today. I collected vintage shears for my installation. They reference labour across generations and many that I collected were fabricated in Sheffield so had started their journey close to YSP. They hold years of physical effort, reflecting the rhythm of historic farm work. I enjoy the layering of complex connections. St Bartholomew was flayed, which is another (rather gruesome) link to the sheep shears. I like your word ecology as that speaks to me of interconnections that loop across humans and the more than human. I hope my works also have an openness to them, allowing viewers to make their own connections.
The Annely Juda solo show opens in October, directly after Time’s Scythe closes. Two very different contexts. a historic landscape and a London gallery. How this difference shaped your approach for each?
I’ll start with similarities. In each context I explored histories and connections, I then made a scale model of the space and began exploring possibilities in a maquette. The particularities of the Chapel at YSP I have mentioned above and how I worked with its history and ecology. That setting brought up for me some of the themes we have discussed, life/death, attraction/repulsion, and working with holding the tension of binaries, not trying to resolve them.
16 Hanover Square, where Annely Juda is now based, has a history I found fascinating to explore. In 1845 The Royal College of Chemistry was founded in the house and that was where William Henry Perkin was working, under Professor Wilhelm Hofmann, when he discovered, and (secretly) patented, the first synthetic aniline dye, mauveine (also known as aniline purple). This colour was used extensively in clothing, as it was a colour that had been associated with wealth and privilege and now could be made cheaply. The theme of dyes and their hidden, or not so hidden, messages continued. In 1905/8, the house was taken over by Reville and Rossiter, Court Dress Makers, and in 1910 all their stock fabric had to be dyed black to cope with the demand for mourning clothes, following the death of King Edward VII. I’ve titled the exhibition I Tear Secrets from Your Yielding Flesh, which is a line from a poem written by Vita Sackville West to her lover Violet Keppel soon after her marriage. She had her wedding dress and parts of her trousseau made by Reville and Rossiter in 1913. Vita Sackville West’s affair was, of course, a same sex relationship, a relationship they had to keep hidden all their lives. Another layer of meaning, for me, in a lot of my work relates to experiences of female shame and how such feelings have been, and continue to be, imposed on women, leading to secrets that can never be expressed. I use these connections as a spring board from which to respond.
Nicola Turne, Tyntesfield, 2024.
© Maxwell Attenborough. Courtesy of the artist.
Time's Scythe, Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
© Nicola Turner. Courtesy of the artist.
About Nicola Turner
Nicola Turner is a British artist whose sculptural practice occupies the threshold between matter and metamorphosis. Working with horsehair, wool, coir, ash, steel, and reclaimed materials, she constructs immersive environments in which the boundaries between the organic and the manufactured, the animate and the inanimate, become increasingly unstable. Her works appear less as static objects than as entities in a continual state of becoming, carrying the residue of time, labour, memory, and decay.
At the core of Turner’s practice is a sustained investigation into material agency. Through processes of gathering, binding, entangling, and transformation, she activates substances traditionally associated with the body, landscape, and industry, allowing them to accumulate new symbolic and physical resonances. Hair, fibre, dust, and fragments of the built environment are reconfigured into forms that evoke growth, erosion, vulnerability, and regeneration. The resulting sculptures oscillate between monument and relic, organism and architecture, inviting a heightened awareness of the invisible systems that connect human experience to broader ecological and geological cycles.
Drawing upon histories of place while remaining deeply attuned to contemporary environmental and social conditions, Turner approaches sculpture as a living encounter. Her installations often respond directly to the spatial, historical, and psychological dimensions of a site, creating environments charged with both tension and intimacy. Through scale, texture, and material presence, she encourages viewers to confront notions of impermanence, interdependence, and transformation.
Recent projects include The Meddling Fiend at the Royal Academy of Arts, Time’s Scythe at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and Fabric of Undoing at Carvalho, New York. Across these works, Turner continues to develop a distinctive sculptural language in which matter itself becomes a protagonist: restless, unpredictable, and perpetually in flux.
Her practice positions sculpture not as a fixed form but as a dynamic field of relations, where material memory, bodily experience, and ecological consciousness converge to reveal the fragile yet resilient structures that shape contemporary existence.
