Alison Turnbull a Bogotá born artist who studied in Madrid and Bath exhibits her work at the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh. A survey of many of the artist’s works on paper, recent paintings and a new site-specific work, based on Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours and Minerals from the National Museums Scotland.
There has been a long productive tension in Turnbull’s work between systems of order, classification and differentiation on the one hand, and the unruly circuits of affect and desire that both attend and exceed the logic of those systems, on the other. – Ed Krčma
She discussed her work, and the publication of her new exhibition catalogue, with the artist, writer and lecturer Ross Birrell and curator Pat Fisher.
Four years in planning the exhibition includes works inspired by her residencies at Cove Park and the Galápagos Islands.
Uneasy relationship between research and art works – detail versus free expression. From research Turnbull gathers architectural drawings, maps, lighthouse plans, navigation charts, atlases, star primers and diagrams. A holistic view to the research provides balance between the imagined abstract and the cultural freight of research. Works gain an extra level of abstraction from the ephemera – rationalised sources form the basis for paintings which preserve the poetry of the universe recorded on a human scale, inviting the viewer into a metaphysical space of harmonious quietude.
All my work involves a process of conversion. Found drawings – frequently architectural plans, cluster diagrams and star charts – are transcribed and embodied within the abstract surface of painting.
Turnbull travelled to the Hebridean island of Canna charting her trip on altered maps, the Barra map forms a link between the drawing tables and star map paintings. The passage of time, planning of journeys and conversions of scale are re-imagined in silverpoint and meticulously finished layered paintings.
They stress the inherent aesthetic qualities of information, otherwise presumed to have a purely functional quality, while demonstrating how the process of painting can record analytical and intuitive relationships. Her work has been described as being about absence and order as much as it is about presence and colour.
See more of her work in the group show ‘Enchanted Isles – Reimagining Galápagos’ at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2 November 2012 – 13 January 2013.