Nicola Turner and the Secret Lives of Discarded Things
Horsehair, wool and abandoned furniture become vessels for memory in the work of British artist Nicola Turner, whose sculptures question where the boundaries between objects, bodies and their surroundings begin and end.
An old chair abandoned in a skip might seem an unlikely discovery for an artist. For Nicola Turner, it offered the material that would come to define much of her sculptural practice. Cycling past, she noticed horsehair protruding through a tear in the upholstery and decided to take the chair home. She dismantled it, uncovering old threads, fabrics and layers of material that had remained hidden for years. There was something unexpectedly alive about the horsehair, a quality that seemed to resist its status as discarded matter. The discovery also brought back a familiar part of her childhood: Turner’s mother had been an upholsterer, and she herself had been sewing from an early age. Using netting and stitching, she found she could manipulate the material into forms that were both structurally manageable and expressive.
At the time, Turner was studying for an MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University, which she completed in 2019. Her experiments had included natural building techniques using cow dung, straw and lime, but the weight of those materials and the slow process of working with them did not suit her physical capabilities or instinctive pace. Horsehair offered something different. Its flexibility allowed her to work quickly, while its previous existence within domestic furniture introduced another dimension: the accumulated histories of objects and their relationship with the people who had used them. Her interest in second-hand objects was already longstanding. While studying in London, she had run a stall at Portobello Road, and flea markets and vintage stalls remain places to which she is naturally drawn. In her sculptures, these interests converge, turning materials that might otherwise be thrown away into objects that resist straightforward definitions of beauty, usefulness and value.
artwork images by Maxwell Attenborough
What Materials Remember
Turner is interested in the physical and emotional traces people leave behind. A piece of furniture may outlive its owner, retain marks from repeated use or become associated with someone who is no longer alive. These connections are central to her understanding of materials. “I’m fascinated by what stories materials have absorbed over the years,” she says. One particularly striking example is a mattress she was given that had reportedly come from a four-poster bed at Fetteresso Castle, near Stonehaven in Scotland. The castle was associated with James Stuart, the Jacobite claimant known as the Old Pretender, who was proclaimed King James III there in 1715. Turner was told he might have slept on the mattress. Although that particular connection remains an anecdote rather than an established historical fact, it illustrates the strange possibility that an ordinary domestic object might have passed through centuries of private and public history. Turner records such stories but avoids letting them dictate the final sculpture. “Although I collect all these stories, when I work on my pieces I try not to let them influence my making but rather let them enter the work subconsciously.”
Her thinking is informed by philosopher Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, which examines the capacity of non-human materials to participate in the world rather than simply exist as passive objects. Turner describes her sculptures as belonging to an interconnected microcosm of human and non-human agents, where even apparently lifeless matter participates in wider relationships. Wool became important to her after horsehair, partly because she recognised a similar vitality in its fibres. She is fascinated by its long history of human use, reaching back thousands of years, and by the unmistakable smell of lanolin, which she experiences as something primal and instinctive. These sensory qualities matter as much as the visible form. Horsehair removed from upholstery can appear strangely bodily, prompting attraction and discomfort at once. Turner draws on ideas of the abject, including those explored by Slavoj Žižek, to consider how close a viewer can come to something unsettling before fascination becomes repulsion. “Responses to hair off the body can be abject. It repels but also seduces the viewer,” she explains. The sculptures do not attempt to resolve this tension. Instead, they allow visitors to establish their own emotional and physical distance from what they encounter.
Memory and loss enter the work through a similarly intuitive process. Turner does not begin with a fixed narrative about mortality or personal experience. She works directly with the materials, often recognising the emotions embedded in a sculpture only when it is finished. “I am often not aware of the emotions I am embedding in a work until it is finished and I can reflect on it,” she says. “I am learning about myself through the process of making.” That openness extends to the audience. A viewer might recognise something domestic in a form that another person finds bodily or threatening. Turner is interested in how individual memories shape these responses, particularly when an object recalls a relationship, a lost family member or a personal experience. For her, the significance of a material lies partly in its capacity to carry associations that cannot necessarily be seen or explained.
artwork images by Maxwell Attenborough
Sculpture, Space and the Freedom to Collect
Before pursuing fine art, Turner worked as a set and costume designer, a background that continues to inform her approach to large-scale sculpture. Theatre gave her practical experience of architectural space, technical planning, structural engineering and the movement of people through a designed environment. It also taught her to create scale models and work within demanding production schedules. These skills have allowed her to approach challenging sites with confidence, particularly when creating installations that respond to the specific architecture or history of a location. She researches these spaces beforehand, looking for relationships between their physical qualities, previous uses and surrounding environments. The resulting work enters into a dialogue with its setting rather than simply occupying it. Yet Turner believes this relationship is present even in her smallest sculptures. “I believe nothing exists independently, so even a freestanding work of mine is in conversation with the space in which it is standing.” When a sculpture moves to a new location, its relationship with the surrounding architecture, objects and people changes with it.
For collectors, this understanding of art as something that continues to interact with its environment offers an interesting perspective on ownership. Turner does not want her sculptures to reveal everything during an initial encounter. Instead, she hopes that living with them allows new associations to emerge over time. “What I hope is, by living with my work, collectors will see something new every day. That each time they look at the work it provokes another train of thoughts or feelings.” Yet the possibility of private ownership plays no part in her decisions while making a piece. She describes the thought of creating work specifically for a private collection as unsettling, believing it could compromise the freedom essential to her process. The sculpture must develop without the restrictions of an anticipated destination, guided by the material and the artist’s own responses rather than the expectations of a future owner. In this sense, the relationship between art and collecting begins only after the creative process has taken its course, when the work enters another environment and acquires new associations.
The same principles guide Turner’s movement between monumental installations and smaller studio works. Large commissions are physically demanding, making it necessary to alternate them with more intimate pieces, but she does not see scale as changing the fundamental questions her work explores. Both approaches investigate the dissolution of boundaries and the continuous exchanges between bodies, objects and ecosystems. She remains curious about working at an even greater scale, particularly within expansive industrial buildings. “When I enter vast industrial spaces, I begin to wonder – how would my material respond to this space?” It is a characteristic question for an artist whose practice began by looking closely at something someone else had discarded. For Turner, the potential of a material is never exhausted by its original purpose. An object can leave one life behind, enter another and continue accumulating meanings through every new encounter.
