Meredith Turnbull Rebecca Coates
Working from home Meredith Turnbull and the pragmatics of space
A thousand different angles explores the legacy of Inge King and Norma Redpath, two central figures of Australian modernist sculpture. Their work is presented alongside the work of eleven contemporary artists, including Meredith Turnbull. Turnbull contributes a number of smaller-scale pedestal sculptures from 2019 to the exhibition, alongside Room Divider, Composition I and Room Divider, Composition II, from 2014, a self-styled modular installation that plays with space itself in a contemporary take on a traditional modernist architectural device. Her works reflect the questions that Turnbull asks through her projects, teaching and research about what it is to be an artist in our current world. What is the relationship of work to life? What is a sustainable practice? And how do you work ethically and effectively as an artist? ‘Working from home’ has become part of life for many more people in the past two years. But it is not new for many artists, who often carve out a home studio or space to work alongside every-day life. Studio spaces can reveal a lot about an artist, their history, and ideals. These spaces tell stories of people and their industry, often revealed in the little things gathered as inspiration, or left over as the residue of past projects or events. Artists—like many people—select furniture, objects, and the artwork of others to make their spaces functional and to express their ideals and beliefs. These might be called the principles of good design, according to the artist, and Turnbull refers to them in her work Room Divider 2014, two timber geometrically shaped frames that are inserted into the space at right angles to the wall. The work evokes traditions of screens and room dividers, while vertical planes offer surfaces on which to position objects and frames others beyond. It is a device to encourage us to pause, its language of warm timber a nod to the materials used by many of the modernist designers and architects from the time of Inge King and Norma Redpath.
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Scale is important for Turnbull. Her sculptures are domestic in size, whole works in their own right, not models for larger public artworks. Everything is considered, and nothing more, nothing less is required. They are neither fussy nor stark. For Standing sculpture oval mirror 2019, an effervescence of black plastic-coated wire floats around its brass tubing armature, lightly attached by a regular office copper paperclip. This is 3-D drawing with wire. It reflects the breadth of Turnbull’s background—a PhD in the field of sculpture and spatial practice, alongside training in photography, art history, and fine arts (gold and silversmithing). An artist, curator and writer, Turnbull’s practice can sometimes be difficult to pin down. She describes herself as a project-based artist, unlike Redpath and King, who saw themselves as studio-based artists—apart from extensive periods collaborating with others to get works manufactured. Turnbull’s work is informed by extensive research, collaboration, and her practice also encompasses curating, lecturing and teaching and arts administration. As a consequence, whether Turnbull’s projects result in artworks, exhibitions, jewellery, or collaborative projects, all entail extensive research and are often supported by writing. For her project Closer 2018 at the Ian Potter Museum, University of Melbourne, she was the artist/curator of a two-part exhibition that presented Collection objects alongside her own photographic prints of those same works. The broader research questions seemed to include the blurred boundaries between ‘craft’ and ‘art’ (with a capital A), and the importance of revealing overlooked histories—often women artists and makers whose names have disappeared as older generations pass. She highlighted histories, revealed makers, and exposed the sometimes sketchy provenance details endemic to many museum collection databases—as a gentle form of institutional critique.
