sculpture › 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.
Memento Mori – process

Visually, the Memento Mori series pulls from autobiography, anthropology, LA lowbrow, early Sienese painting. Scales slip, perspectives warp, time folds in on itself. The process is just as hybrid, as drawings become rough models; wax and clay figures are built, scanned, broken down, rebuilt; digital simulations generate smoke, dust, breath. Each diorama takes about 6 to 8 months to develop. The final images are printed using now-obsolete LightJet technology on Duratrans film, a final flowering of analogue tangled up with digital construction. This photomontage shows just a few of the elements of the process.
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.
Relic Redux

2020. Acacia wood and acrylic paint. 170 x 30 x 30 cm.

The inscriptions of time on the body. A tally stick of experiences. I felt the bare wood of this 2011 piece would benefit from the experiments and discoveries made while painting the Last Laugh heads.

An opportunity for one of my favourite Cocteau quotes – “You’ve never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.”
Last Laugh – box set

2020. Mixed media. 30 x 10 10 cm.

A grace note to mark the end of this project. Gruesomely detailed. If you don’t know La Specola museum in Florence, then you have a treat in store.
Last Laugh – Venice

2019. Pop-up performance at the Venice Biennale.

My favourite response to the performance was the violent anger that it provoked in some people. And they were right, of course. We are being taken for fools. But when we start laughing at the powerful, they can prove remarkably fragile. Ceausescu’s fall was an education.

Flyers were distributed during the performance, with links to free downloadable 3D models of the heads, and a competition inviting people to make their own creative use of them.
Last Laugh – Venice

2019. Pop-up performance at the Venice Biennale.

The locally recruited actors responded to wearing these giant heads and the non-stop manic laughter tracks with a fantastically inventive range of gestures and body language. The rictus expressions of the masks seemed to come alive.
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.
Last Laugh – Robert

2018. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36 cm.
Last Laugh – Robert

2018. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36 cm.

Since my time in Pietrasanta, I have been fascinated by representing hair in sculpture. It’s about finding the appropriate system of abstraction, and the hand learning the gestures.
Last Laugh – Kim

2018. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36 cm.
Last Laugh – Kim

2018. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36 cm.
Last Laugh – Bashar – pocket version

2017. Polyurethane resin. 5 x 3 x 3 cm. Unlimited edition.

A little bit of Voodoo. There is something very pleasing about carrying around the shrunken, severed head of your enemy. It worked on Robert, and eventually Bashar. We live in hope. If you ask me nicely, I might give you one of these.
Last Laugh – Bashar

2016. Fibreglass and acrylic paint, with integrated video guidance system, battery powered PA and looped laughter track. 65 x 36 x 36cm.

We have all known bullies. They like to excuse it as having a laugh. But at what point will we draw the line, and say this is enough, it’s not funny anymore? At what point does tyranny itself become ridiculous?

Coinciding with a period that saw me erase myself from the internet, this was the first in a series of wearables, designed for performance, that turned into a 3 year dark project, in which I engaged with portraiture for the first time.
Animal Spirits
2017. Wood, money, buttons, cotton. 41 x 15 x 6 cm.

I inherited this from my economist father, a souvenir from his consulting work in Africa. I re-carved it to have the eyes from one of Rembrandt’s later self portraits, sadder and wiser after its engagement with global capital.
Abjects
2016. 30pp book of photographs. Edition of 20. 10 x 10 x 0.5 cm.

Sitting in bars and restaurants, I find my hands just making things out of the detritus on the table – peanut shells, bottle tops, toothpicks etc. A rude and nervous habit. But I started photographing the results. A timid and insignificant riposte to the big, shiny art of our era.
Mummy And Daddy
2014. Vitrine, wallpaper, model V2 rocket, model atom bomb and mixed media. 79 x 41 x 129 cm.

The Cowboys and Indians wallpaper that lines the floor of this vitrine was in my bedroom as a child. In retrospect it seems hardly accidental, living as we were in the shadow of Mutual Assured Destruction, another mythic confrontation.