dialogue
Nicola Turner | Artist
September 2025
6 min read
Nicola Turner’s sculptural practice began with a discarded chair spilling horsehair. Drawn to its hidden histories and memories, she combined it with salvaged wool, an undervalued material often left to waste. Together, these organic “dead” matters become alive again, carrying story, touch, and presence.
With a background in stage and costume design, Turner brings scale, structure, and light into her sculptural world. Her installations explore powerful contrasts: life and death, attraction and repulsion, human and non-human, revealing the uncanny vitality within discarded materials.
At Art Basel Unlimited, Turner presented Danse Macabre with Annely Juda Fine Art, a towering installation of horsehair and wool reaching 10 meters high. Inspired by the medieval allegory of death as an equaliser, the work echoed the fragility of life while affirming renewal.
Nicola Turner. Photo by Maxwell Attenborough.
What inspired your choice of using horsehair and salvaged wool as materials in your sculptures?
“I had been working on large drawings using charcoal and wax and I was wanting to get them off the page into 3D. During my MA, from which I graduated in 2019, I experimented with many different materials including traditional cobb and plaster. It was while cycling past a skip and finding a chair with horsehair oozing out that gave me the idea to pursue that as a medium. I was fascinated by the process of dissecting the chair to reach the innards and the discovery of all the memories of the chair, for example the different threads and fabric swatches found in the chair and also thinking about the history of the material and what secrets and stories it had been exposed to.
My mother was an upholster so the materials were familiar to me. I introduced wool into the mix after I was looking to scale up my work and realized that wool is currently really undervalued in this country, often going to waste. Both horsehair and wool are organic ‘dead’ matter and alive with a rich history.”
Installation view: Nicola Turner, Danse Macabre, Annely Juda at Art Basel Unlimited, 2025.
How did your background in stage and costume design impact your transition to sculpture?
“My previous career in theatre has equipped me with knowledge that has been useful to my sculpture practice. I have experience working at scale, as well as the more practical aspects of health and safety requirements, structural calculations, importance of lighting and meeting deadlines. All have proved useful, especially when realizing my more ambitious works. In Lapses at Shatwell Farm Silo, Somerset, I collaborated with Clare Whistler and Jim Blackburn to bring sound and movement to the installation. It felt like a rich coalescence.”
Installation view: Nicola Turner, The Meddling Fiend, at Royal Academy, London. Photograpby by Maxwell Attenborough.
What attracted you to exploring contrasts such as life and death, human and non-human, or attraction and repulsion through your sculptural work?
“I am fascinated by our interconnection to the world around us, the traces we leave after touching an object, the way we, as humans, are made up of many different ecosystems including a rich gut flora. The found material I use is ‘dead’ matter which is nevertheless alive with history. I explore how materials give off energy forces, including how alive ‘dead’ matter can seem. My work resonates with the notion of abjection: with this primal instinct - a disorientating sense of attraction and repulsion upsets our perceived firm grasp of the world – sometimes bringing an acute awareness of melancholy and death. Amid this state of unsettlement, however, an affirmation of life’s forces and the possibility of renewal can be present.”
Installation view: Nicola Turner, Myth and Miasma, Vestdalseyri Valley, Iceland, 2022. Photography courtesy of the artist.
Are there specific artists or thinkers who have significantly influenced your current artistic approach? If so, what aspects of their work resonate with you?
“I believe humans hold important connections to materials. This idea is explored by Jane Bennett in “Vibrant Matter”. Bennett theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. As I work with horsehair, its history becomes part of me (quite literally, when I breathe in or swallow dust) and I become a part of its history, as I mold it into new forms and new appreciations.
Slavoj Zizek’s writing on abjection resonates with me. He writes: “Abject points to a domain which is the source of our life intensity - we draw our energy out of it, but we have to keep it at the right distance. If we exclude it, we lose our vitality, but if we get too close to it, we are swallowed by the self-destructive vortex of madness”. I hope my sculptures allow an exploration of what is this “right” distance, for each viewer.
I also find powerful Donna Harraway’s theories on tentacular thinking. The tendrils I create (from wool and horsehair in net) can sometimes seem alive, like tentacles. Harraway plays with the way that tentacles are “feelers” both sensing the world and affecting the world, in their sensing. Tentacles offer a metaphor for how we are enmeshed in the living world, entangled through our gut, how we perceive, how we feel, how we think and how, in doing these things, we are not gaining access to the world passively, we are affected and affecting.“
Nicola Turner, The Annunciation, wool, horsehair fabric, steel, and recycled polyamide, 63 x 60 x 30 cm, 2024. Photography courtesy of the artist.
Do you meticulously plan your sculptures, or do they evolve organically as you work?
“It really depends on the situation. For example, when I was creating installations in the Icelandic landscape while on a residency at the Skaftfell Art Centre in Seyðisfjörður, I walked around looking for locations and crevices, working at that moment with what I found and the material I had with me. When creating large scale freestanding work, I often use a hired structure to support my material so some planning happens in advance, but I always leave room for the final shape to emerge while installing.”
Installation view: Nicola Turner, Echoed Ecstasy, Coker Court, Nicola Turner with Clare Whistler response, credit Katy Docking Od Arts Festival 2023.
Could you share insights about the artwork you presented with Annely Juda gallery at Art Basel Unlimited?
“Art Basel Unlimited was the first time I exhibited with Annely Juda Gallery. I exhibited in Art Basel Unlimited with a large-scale installation Danse Macabre around one of the existing architectural columns and reaching up to the ceiling beams of Hall 1. The installation was composed of tendrils of waste horsehair and natural raw wool sourced locally to my studio. I spent three days, with a team of four, assembling the work in situ using a scissor lift to reach up to the 10m height.
The title Danse Macabre is taken from a Late Middle Ages allegorical art form, that depicts the universality of death as a direct response to plagues and epidemics. Danse Macabre has become a recurring theme in art history and is often used to depict death as a social equalizer and a reminder of the fragility of life and the vanity of earthly glory. Basel’s own Danse Macabre mural, painted around 1435-1441, remained one of the city’s greatest attractions until it was torn down by locals, who declared it a scandal, in August 1805. This theme resonated with me in the context of contemporary pandemics. The sense of death as an equalizer and the fragility of life resonates with the themes of my work I’ve mentioned earlier, which I think are present in this work also.
Annely Juda Gallery also presented five of my smaller works on their booth. It was exciting to share my practice with the Art Basel audience. My first solo exhibition with Annely Juda will be in their new gallery space in Hanover Square, London in 2026.”
Special thanks to Holly Braine & Annely Juda Fine Art.
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