Meredith Turnbull
Mood Mirror
21 October - 14 November 2020
Meredith Turnbull’s practice concerns the world of things as the form-creating basis of culture. She is interested in making and material, and the experiential and temporal register of forms. Her practice engages various disciplines and approaches inclusive of making, writing and curating. Her artworks engage diverse scales, art historical traditions and genres – and manifest in connections between the body and sculpture, images, decorative objects and jewellery. Mood Mirror is a new project by the artist.
“I have an ongoing interest in philosophical notions of excess explored by feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz. Her writing around this subject looks at why species including humans create. Grosz sees creativity in this context as a productive, generative force; a force that is essential to life, but also extends beyond the function of natural and sexual selection. Mood Mirror is a new body of sculptural and image based work for exhibition that responds to the question of why make art? And why make it now? Recognising that despite the ongoing political disenfranchisement of the arts, arts education and artists, the desire to create is fundamental to being human and to many other species in life. The project includes themes of family, identity and inter-generational engagement in cultural production. This project was intended to incorporate direct collaboration with my daughter Roma Turnbull-Coulter and my mother Jenny Turnbull, however given Stage 4 restrictions this became increasingly difficult. Our collaboration in reality has meant an exchange of materials; Roma’s artworks from childcare and primary school, playing with materials from home, gathering flowers from my mother’s garden and using some of her silk and ink test-pieces in the photographs. Mood Mirror explores some of my ongoing themes including; still life, the construction of tableaux, the relationship between objects and images and in turn the body, and it embraces ideas of art as play, art as culture, art as life.”
— Meredith Turnbull, 2020
This project was created on the sacred and sovereign Country of the Yalukit Willam clan of the Boon Wurrung. We acknowledge the Boon Wurrung as the Traditional Owners of Port Phillip and the land on which we live and work and pay our respects to Elders past, present and emerging. We also extend our respects to Bunjil the creator ancestor of the Kulin Nations.
Mood Mirror is supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria.
EXHIBITION WALK-THROUGH NARRATED BY MEREDITH TURNBULL
Installation views
Mood Mirror Series 2: large photographs
Mood Mirror Series 2, 2020
archival inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag
edition of 3 and 2AP
86 x 58 cm, 88 x 60 cm framed
Mood Mirror Series 1: small photographs
Mood Mirror Series 1, 2020
archival inkjet print on Hahnemuhle Photo Rag
edition of 3 and 2AP
40 x 30 cm, 42 x 32 cm framed
