Meredith Turnbull

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. 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.

Turnbull is still questioning the line between art and craft. The small sculptural objects selected for this exhibition at McClelland reflect Turnbull’s training as a jeweller and silversmith in her eye for finish, and facility in working with materials, both manufactured and repurposed. Ceramicists are increasingly concerned about the ‘plinth’ on which their work is placed, and it is the same for sculptors with a jewellery or silversmithing background, where every aspect is central to the work. The bases of Turnbull’s sculptures are created through folds of metal, stacking and wedging which provide deceptively simple and sophisticated solutions essential to the whole.

The ethics of materials are also important for Turnbull. Though often employing pre-used materials in her artwork, she doesn’t describe these components as found materials. Instead, they are recycled parts that contribute to a new whole. The underpinning ethic is the importance of making art sustainably. It leads Turnbull to find the beauty in things past and sometimes overlooked. In Steel waveform with pink tie 2019, for example, she uses a small pink thread as a bow that loosely foulards at the neck of a folded copper sheet. Flat steel 2019 is similarly resolved, with circular holes pre-punched in lines around two sides of a square steel sheet, contrasting with the rust bloom on the metal base and other parts of the plate, and a scraffito of white lines that might be a drawing by Turnbull added later, or something else found. There’s something profoundly satisfying about the materials selected and Turnbull’s language of playful restraint. One can’t help but think of the use of found materials in assemblages by great male artists in the early 20th century such as Robert Rauschenberg, Arman and the like. But we shouldn’t forget the 1970s feminist practices that similarly championed recycling up as art materials and a sophisticated low-fi environmental aesthetic in their teaching and community based-projects. The ethics of artmaking clearly continue to challenge Turnbull. Her recent exhibition Mood Mirror (2020) at Daine Singer was in part an investigation of ‘why make art, and why make it now’. She questioned the sustainability of practice, the need to make a wage, and the demands of family in the middle period of her career. So, she connected with family members separated by pandemic-induced isolation by incorporating materials found at home such as her daughter Roma’s primary school art, the flowers from her mother’s garden, and her mother’s silk and ink test-pieces. Turnbull notes that this approach enabled her to examine the world of things ‘as the form-creating basis for culture’. And culture is as much about connection and people, as it is a collection of things.

Meredith Turnbull installation view