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.
