Alison Turnbull
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Alison Turnbull’s contemporary abstract paintings take charts and scientific diagrams and distil from them colour, rhythm and pattern, to create images of startling clarity and beauty.
Describing her exhibition Turnbull has said:
My exhibition at Talbot Rice brings together recent paintings and drawings, shown in the White Gallery, with a new installation created for the Round Room. The exhibition is conceived as a lexicon of looking, a series of encounters that are displaced and then echoed as one moves through the different rooms and spaces. Painting and drawing are in close and constant dialogue. Drawing is a testing ground and a working method, and found drawings provide source material for the larger paintings. Most of these paintings take the night sky - or rather the ways in which we observe and map the night sky - as their starting point. Indeed, the whole gallery becomes a kind of observatory, a place for concentrated looking.
Drawings on found sheets of graph paper, exercise books and scores are presented in three Drawing Tables. The apparent neutrality of the gridded papers, which I’ve been collecting for some years from places I visit, is nuanced and disrupted by the drawn systems I introduce.
The work conceived for the Round Room, which might be viewed as the culmination of the exhibition, is site-specific in various ways. Not only is it drawn and painted directly onto the room’s curved walls, but it is inspired by a manual, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, produced in Edinburgh in 1814. This colour manual, functioning as a sort of 19th Century Pantone chart for scientists, was based on mineral specimens once used for teaching in the University and now in the collection of National Museums Scotland. A selection of these minerals and the colour manual are displayed as part of the installation.
Alison Turnbull was born in Bogotá, studied at Bath Academy of Art and now lives and works in London. She has had solo exhibitions since the late 1980s and her work has been shown internationally. She is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.
Supported by Year of Creative Scotland 2012 and Matt's Gallery, London.
Exhibition Guide
Published on the occasion of 'Alison Turnbull' at Talbot Rice Gallery, the University of Edinburgh.
Texts are available to view below or download.
One mistake that can be made about painting or drawing is that it always illustrates something else or represents something else; so even though Alison Turnbull’s work is predominantly abstract, people might still say that it represents the star-charts or architectural plans that inspired it. But what Turnbull’s works show is that the activity of painting and drawing also has its own quality and the ability to affect us quite differently from the things to which they relate.
To give one example, in Observatory (2010) a page from the original sky atlas by Antonín Becvár made in 1948, the first attempt to map the entire sky as seen from telescopes, becomes in Turnbull’s painting an image in which different ways of looking and imagining come into play. In Turnbull’s version, the grid is preserved – although allowed to spill off the edge of the canvas – while the background is rendered an inpenetrable dark blue and the colour coding of the stars is transformed. The dark background allows the stars to resonate in a way closer to viewing the night sky, evoking a sense of wonder and scale that the original map’s mathematical basis renders in a very different way.
For these reasons Ed Krcma, in the fully illustrated catalogue accompanying this exhibition, writes, “There has long been a 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.” Turnbull works incredibly carefully and precisely to reproduce information while at the same time interpreting it, connecting colours, for example, to art historical references and working, as we do as viewers, with a range of values and ideas.
The work conceived for the Round Room is site-specific in various ways. Not only is it drawn and painted directly onto the room’s curved walls, but it is inspired by a manual, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, produced in Edinburgh in 1814. Exhibited with a selection of the mineral specimens upon which it is based, the manual encapsulates many of the artists long term interests and concerns with colour and classification. More information about the installation is provided upstairs.
Alison Turnbull was born in Bogotá, studied at Bath Academy of Art and now lives and works in London. She has had solo exhibitions since the late 1980s and her work has been shown internationally. She is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.
Patrick Syme, Werner’s Nomenclature of Colours, S.B. .172 Wer. Courtesy of Edinburgh University Library The mineral specimens, on loan courtesy of the Trustees of the National Museums Scotland
All works are courtesy the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.
