COMA is pleased to present Edge Of The Garden, a solo presentation by photographer and multimedia artist Shan Turner-Carroll, on view 23 October – 20 November in the gallery.
This exhibition is presented in collaboration with Art Incubator.
These night visions emerge as apparitions found at the Edge Of The Garden, between dusk and dawn, as though of an alternate dream world. During the period of Covid isolation, I spent several months making wearable sculptures and photographing members of my family on the property I grew up on. More than simply adornment or even protection, each sculpture is an apparatus, designed to interact with the body. The wearables were produced from materials found on the property, including objects from my past such as old sportswear, dance costumes, curtains, carpets, knives and flowers. The process of inventing, wearing and performing for the camera reveals a central part of my childhood growing up in rural NSW, where boredom was a constant threat and entertainment found its outlets in Easter hat parades, dance eisteddfods, nativity scenes and home-made music videos.
Edge Of The Garden both un-earths a family history, at the same time re-earthing that history to my familial (and familiar) environment anew. Boxing gloves become terrariums, and crutches turn into limbs. The resulting imagery lives in the realm of the uncanny, existing between places and times; between vision and blindness, real and imagined, unease and rest. Like animals in headlights, or indeed backyard nocturnal critters exposed by torchlight, my family are reposed as strange spirits of the unconscious, shape shifters in transition, jewels in the night.
Shan Turner-Carroll (b. 1987) is an Australian artist of Burmese descent. Shan’s practice responds to both site and situation have related to include both human and non-human nature, alternative forms of social exchange and interactions between art, artist and viewer. Looking towards the multiplicity of to his work. Not only in making, but rather in how an embodied methodology of making emerges upon each site and location.
His practice questions current modes of living, and explores alternative methodologies and modes of education. A deep philosophy within his work is thinking through doing. Over the past three years his work has evolved from still photography into a multidisciplinary practice that corrodes the boundaries historical and behavioural conventions have erected between art and life. Shan uses the ritual of art making and its transformative agency to question how art core of his practice is the conviction that art has a meaningful and active role within contemporary, industrial, globalised societies in which the paradigm of the individual is most present.
