2010 › Nick Turvey

Brian Mercer Award
Recipient of the 2010 Mercer Award, which provides a fully funded 3 month residency at Studio Sem in Pietrasanta, Italy. The award is designed to provide established and talented sculptors working in materials other than stone the opportunity to investigate the expressive potential of marble.

Studio Sem is one of the most renowned fine art stone studios in the world, having realised monumental works for an international roster of famous artists.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
2010. Pink Portuguese marble. 45 x 31 x 17 cm.

I like to use materials not so much as a medium, but more as a physical fact, poetically entangled with historical, political, and other associations. Working with marble in Pietrasanta, one is surrounded by the skills, traditions and examples of neoclassicism – heroic, dramatic, illusionistic. Yet this metamorphosis of the body into stone betrays a fundamental unease, a fear of the body’s messiness and complexity, which provided the context for my work. I have sampled or isolated elements of neoclassical style, unsettling yet strangely familiar, in the service of what I consider a blackly comic form of existentialism.
Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
2010. Pink Portuguese marble. 45 x 31 x 17 cm.

I like to use materials not so much as a medium, but more as a physical fact, poetically entangled with historical, political, and other associations. Working with marble in Pietrasanta, one is surrounded by the skills, traditions and examples of neoclassicism – heroic, dramatic, illusionistic. Yet this metamorphosis of the body into stone betrays a fundamental unease, a fear of the body’s messiness and complexity, which provided the context for my work. I have sampled or isolated elements of neoclassical style, unsettling yet strangely familiar, in the service of what I consider a blackly comic form of existentialism.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
2010. White marble. 57 x 20 x 20 cm.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
2010. White marble. 57 x 20 x 20 cm.
War Baby
2010. Soapstone. 22 x 15 x 13 cm.
War Baby
2010. Soapstone. 22 x 15 x 13 cm.
War Baby
2010. Soapstone. 22 x 15 x 13 cm.
Wand
2010. Carrara marble. 48 x 2 x 2 cm.
Saturn
2010. Soapstone. 15 x 15 x 15 cm.
Saturn
2010. Soapstone. 15 x 15 x 15 cm.
Methuselah
2010. Corten steel. 320 x 320 x 400 cm.

Interesting properties emerge at the interface where one kind of order meets another. You could call it algorithmic form, a cognitive hack of the eye and brain to exploit our figurative bias, akin to the mathematical simulation involved in image compression.

Acquired by Newhall Projects for the Harlow Art Trust collection, and permanently installed in the new park at the centre of Newhall. To visit, drive to the end of The Chase, CM17 9JA. A map of Harlow’s extensive sculpture collection can be downloaded from here or here.
Methuselah
2010. Corten steel. 320 x 320 x 400 cm.

Interesting properties emerge at the interface where one kind of order meets another. You could call it algorithmic form, a cognitive hack of the eye and brain to exploit our figurative bias, akin to the mathematical simulation involved in image compression.

Acquired by Newhall Projects for the Harlow Art Trust collection, and permanently installed in the new park at the centre of Newhall. To visit, drive to the end of The Chase, CM17 9JA. A map of Harlow’s extensive sculpture collection can be downloaded from here or here.
Methuselah
2010. Corten steel. 320 x 320 x 400 cm.

Interesting properties emerge at the interface where one kind of order meets another. You could call it algorithmic form, a cognitive hack of the eye and brain to exploit our figurative bias, akin to the mathematical simulation involved in image compression.

Acquired by Newhall Projects for the Harlow Art Trust collection, and permanently installed in the new park at the centre of Newhall. To visit, drive to the end of The Chase, CM17 9JA. A map of Harlow’s extensive sculpture collection can be downloaded from here or here.
Engineered
Group show

RBS Studio Gallery

17th June – 23rd July 2010

James Capper, Wendy Earle, Mark Firth, Joseph Ingleby, Andrew Revell, Nick Turvey

108 Old Brompton Road, London SW7 3RA
Wednesday – Friday 11.00 – 16.30 hrs.

Image: Anxiety (detail)
Anxiety
Jelly – 90 x 14 x 14 cm. – 2010

1:20 scale model of Polaris nuclear missile.
Anxiety
Jelly – 90 x 14 x 14 cm. – 2010

1:20 scale model of Polaris nuclear missile.