mortality › Nick Turvey

Cataclysm

2023. Lenticular 3D lightjet print on lightbox. 105 x 105 x 5 cm.

DISCLAIMER: This series of works was designed so as to be impossible to photograph, in reaction to the tyranny of Instagram. Standing in front of one, with your two eyes, you look into a fully three-dimensional scene, like one of those museum dioramas. Every element has been sculpted, and you can look around and discover new details, the perspective changing as you move your head. But photograph it, and the space collapses. So here I am, hoist by my own petard!

The series is called Memento Mori, densely layered narrative tableaux that investigate the philosophical and emotional dimensions of death, variously seen as erasure, exile, annihilation, transformation, forgetting; each one based on the loss of a significant person in my life.
Metempsychosis

2021. Lenticular 3D lightjet print on lightbox. 105 x 105 x 5 cm.

DISCLAIMER: This series of works was designed so as to be impossible to photograph, in reaction to the tyranny of Instagram. Standing in front of one, with your two eyes, you look into a fully three-dimensional scene, like one of those museum dioramas. Every element has been sculpted, and you can look around and discover new details, the perspective changing as you move your head. But photograph it, and the space collapses. So here I am, hoist by my own petard!

The series is called Memento Mori, densely layered narrative tableaux that investigate the philosophical and emotional dimensions of death, variously seen as erasure, exile, annihilation, transformation, forgetting; each one based on the loss of a significant person in my life.
Legacy

2019. Alabaster. 40 x 40 x 16 cm.

My father gave me a block of alabaster as a birthday present. It sat around for a year or two while I thought of something appropriate to do with it. Then he died, and the decision became even more charged. I thought about all the knowledge and interests and values that I admired about him, and which I aspire to emulate. They became embodied in objects and symbols, wrapped as a present, decorated with a bow, and owing something to the tradition of veiled funeral sculpture.
All Alone Together – Bunker 1
2013. Concrete, aggregate blocks, mortar, plywood. 275 x 210 x 135 cm.

Three sculptural installations – claustrophobic, defensive spaces reminiscent of military bunkers – have been built in the gallery, and individuals and groups in Harlow are invited to make use of them. Here is an opportunity to examine the meaning of selfhood and togetherness, developing the idea of a community art gallery as a place of meeting and action.
The Binding Problem
2011. Carrara marble. 80 x 65 x 65 cm.

Dying in his cell or hospital bed, trapped in memories, Beckett’s character Malone recounts: “When I open staring wide my eyes I see at the confines of this restless gloom a gleam and shimmering as of bones, which was not hitherto the case, to the best of my knowledge. And I can even distinctly remember the paper-hangings or wallpaper still clinging to the walls in places and covered with a writhing mass of roses, violets and other flowers …”.
The Binding Problem
2011. Carrara marble. 80 x 65 x 65 cm.

Dying in his cell or hospital bed, trapped in memories, Beckett’s character Malone recounts: “When I open staring wide my eyes I see at the confines of this restless gloom a gleam and shimmering as of bones, which was not hitherto the case, to the best of my knowledge. And I can even distinctly remember the paper-hangings or wallpaper still clinging to the walls in places and covered with a writhing mass of roses, violets and other flowers …”.
The Binding Problem
2011. Carrara marble. 80 x 65 x 65 cm.

Dying in his cell or hospital bed, trapped in memories, Beckett’s character Malone recounts: “When I open staring wide my eyes I see at the confines of this restless gloom a gleam and shimmering as of bones, which was not hitherto the case, to the best of my knowledge. And I can even distinctly remember the paper-hangings or wallpaper still clinging to the walls in places and covered with a writhing mass of roses, violets and other flowers …”.