Shan Turner-Carroll – Abbotsford Convent

COMA artist Shan Turner-Carroll is currently exhibiting in Abbotsford Convent garden’s night exhibition Interspecies and Other Others, curated by artistic director Kelli Aldred.

“This exhibition is about relationships. It is about our connectedness and the wondrous, tumultuous complexity of our coexistence,” explains Alred in a curator statement. The show proposes a set of alternat[iv]e imaginaries that consider the entanglement of human beings, other species and our environment. It also asks a set of fundamental questions about how the speculative and often contradictory self builds fluid, non-binary relationships with the other.

The participating artists interrogate human-to-human, as well as human-to-animal and plant interactions to probe broader environmental and socio-political concerns. Examining how cultural constructs such as language and media influence perception, behaviour and social identity, the artists shed light on how the deconstruction and decolonisation of those constructs may bring new models of reciprocity and accountability to the fore.” Aldred.

Shan Turner-Carroll work’s Edge Of The Garden Zion, 2020 and Edge Of The Garden Bortford, 2020 are exhibiting in Interspecies and Other Others. Both photographs conjure a set of nocturnal figures captured between dusk and dawn.

During a period of COVID isolation, Turner-Carroll spent several months making wearable sculptures and photographing members of his family on the property where he grew up in regional NSW. Each sculpture is an apparatus, designed to interact with the body and produced from materials found on site, including objects from the artist’s childhood such as old sportswear, dance costumes, curtains and carpets. By reimagining the use of these everyday items, Turner-Carroll both un-earths and repositions his familial history.  

Two photographs from an editioned series of ten are integrated into architectural portals on the rear of the Abbotsford Convent’s Magdalen Laundry. 

 This site-specific installation has been created from the following original artworks:  

Shan Turner-Carroll, Edge Of The Garden Zion, 2020, archival digital ink jet print, framed, 115 x 79cm, edition of 6  

Shan Turner-Carroll, Edge Of The Garden Bortford, 2020, archival digital ink jet print, framed, 115 x 79cm, edition of 6 

View more available works here.