Shan Turner-Carroll

​COMA is pleased to present a solo exhibition, titled ‘The Snake, The Rock and The River’, by Sydney-based artist Shan Turner-Carroll, on view 15 July – 20 August, 2022 in the Darlinghurst Gallery. This is the artist’s second solo presentation with COMA.

The new body of work marks Shan Turner-Carroll’s dynamic and continuing solicitude and response to the notions of land, environment and history, comprising a group of works on paper, photographs, sculptures and installations. Drawing on the action and intervention of his artistic practice, Turner-Carroll tends to connect nuanced ecology-based relationships and symbiotic logics across time and sites, as to seek the possibility of communication, exchange and transcend.

Through the processes of working with seven psychics, the exhibition developed  around three important and poetic ideas, all of which are relevant to the region where the suite of work started to emerge – Bundanon, in southern NSW Australia is where the work was produced during the artist’s residency at the end of 2021. Interwoven with personal experience, local tale and geographical background, the three main elements, in which the work grounds itself, provide an autobiographical focus with multiple narratives in the exhibition. These can be readily interacted with and trailed, and would be combined into a contemporary interpretation of grand propositions.

A huge serpentine skeleton immortalizes with the local woodiness and patterned structures while retaining its sharp jawbones. At the same time, a snake installation was born to the ground with an anthropomorphic body shape, accompanied by the background music produced by the artist – as a love song, calling for some kind of spirituality. The stereotypical impression of a stone has been eliminated in the photograph, replaced by a supernatural microcosm that becomes metaphysical and sophisticated, in an abyssal darkness, or in the energy-inspired splashes. In the hands of nature, the artist groups his approaches to complete a challenging abstraction practice one after another. The marks on paper from the flowing water and spreading branches become both the ingredients and threshold into a specific site. Meanwhile, an empathic vibration is organically shared and accumulated in the process of collaborating with 7 psychics and of telepathically communicating with the artist’s companions. The “conversations” were archived and published, like a waterfall coming down in a torrent, to inspire further resonance.

During this period of learning I discovered that most if not all snakes don’t have an outer ear or a middle ear, but do have an inner ear. The snake will lay its head on the ground and through bone condition the snake feels vibrations through its jaw, which directly travels to the inner ear.
When Beethoven was in his later years of his life, he went deaf and would compose his music through bone conduction. He would place a thin stick of wood onto the piano and hold it in his teeth so that he could feel the vibrations and understand what he was doing.
This directed me to make a device that allowed me to listen tap into these vibrations that the psychics were suggesting. In producing my own jaw bone conductor, i tried to eplicate the actions of the snakes or Beethoven.“

– Shan Turner-Carroll

The many objects and photographs in The snake, the rock and the river are connected by Turner-Carroll’s intuitive investigation into the poetic and physical effects of waves, vibrations and ripples. Interacting like notes in a musical composition, the components of this installation reveal the transmission of energy between all things-animal, human and landscape alike.

Boe-Lin Bastian, Assistant Curator, Bundanon Trust, NSW Australia

I wanted these drawings to be in direct collaboration with the land. basically letting the trees and the creek leave their own marks with little intervention. I held paper up to the trees and did rubbings, collecting and recording the marks from the scored and burnt trunks.

Shan Turner-Carroll

I learnt about a snake handler called Dusty, who often was called to remove them from populated areas. I became interested in the relationships between Dusty and the snakes and the act of removing or relocating them from one place to another. This gesture, this act of intervention sparked my intuitive interest.”

Shan Turner-Carroll