SHAN TURNER-CARROLL
’BODIES ON A ROCK’
3 AUGUST - 2 SEPTEMBER, 2022
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies On A Rock (detail), 2016-2020, installation view, dimensions variable, MRAG, NSW. Image courtesy of the artist.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Bodies On A Rock includes moving images, sculptures and assemblages developed and made during an artist in residency program in the regional Icelandic town of Seyðisfjörður. Amongst the mountains, black waterfalls and green skies, Turner-Carroll lived and worked with the experimental art community, LungA School. This experience informed the basis for Bodies on a Rock, that is the examination nature, the body, and perception of existing colonial visions of land and the blueprints that lay within assumptions of reality.
Bodies on a Rock transforms the familiar into the unfamiliar. Polystyrene carvings pose as fictional rocks, whipper snippers become steady cams, mirror-coated snow gloves belie their previous life, torchlight and video projections on a t-shirt or pane of Claude glass, illuminate the alchemy of Turner-Carroll’s artistic process.
Deeply fascinated with unearthing tacit knowledge, Bodies on a Rock questions an inherited understanding and relationship to the non-human world, particularly through the lens of the body. As viewers navigate and self-edit their experience of the installation, their body becomes a site of perception and subjectivity–indeed, a landscape of its own.
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies on a rock, 2022, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
A gradual process of becoming a rock
We are all bodies on a rock. From this premise, Shan Turner-Carroll teases out the phenomenological possibilities for our relationship to the earth we inhabit. He playfully offers other hierarchies; new models for understanding and experiencing ourselves as bodies on this rock we call earth.
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies on a rock, 2022, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Journeying the long distance from his rural home in NSW to the remote Eastern fjord town of Seyðisfjörður Iceland in 2016, the artist was confronted with his urge to take a small rock from a beautiful glacier he visited, as a kind of souvenir. From questioning that initial gesture, and a subsequent inquiry into the relationship between human and landscape, this body of work unfolded over the proceeding several years.
Imbued as they are with multiple time periods and locations, the sculptures in Bodies on a Rock are simulacra of actual rocks – palimpsests that both contain and further magnetise an array of objects, perceptions and experiences into their orbit. The installation performs a sequence of simulations, while leaving the hierarchy of this sequence unordered, unresolved and undefined; an interplay between nature and facsimile, human and other.
Like the evidence left by humans on the landscape, the sculptural objects are scarred (or perhaps, rather, embellished) with marks of human contact: a tennis racket, an optical lens, a cavity fitting a smartphone and cabling. Additionally, for the various technological devices used in the exhibition such as projectors, wiring and tripods, Turner-Carroll has fashioned endearingly makeshift supports. Appendages of twigs, dried spaghetti and tape (so excessively applied as to appear like a bandaged limb) bestow these modern-day machines with a kind of uncanny, unplaceable anthropomorphism.
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies on a rock, 2022, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Taking in the landscape of Bodies on a Rock is like walking into an animistic environment where the boundaries between human, natural and mechanical world are blended. The objects could either be prehistoric, or post-apocalyptic; or indeed from an alien universe – so conditioned is our conscious mind to reject any merging of the categories by which we understand our world. Of course, though, they are entirely and utterly of this world. The viewers’ bodies are invited into the orbit of the objects as they move around the installation; a final simulation of the process of self-editing we all pre-consciously participate in daily as we move through our surroundings.
Considering his own body in relation to the sculptures, Turner-Carroll describes his role as a kind of conduit for the elements – embodying the aeons of wind and rain that would have been necessary to carve or erode the rocks he was attempting to simulate. Language creates something too: in his naming these sculptural objects as ‘rocks’ rather than a collection of plaster, polystyrene and paint, he is also simulating the role that language has on our perceptions of the world around us – indeed on our perception as being ‘other’ in relation to the natural world.
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies on a rock, 2022, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Like satellites, cosmic objects, or space junk, the rocks coalesce here, now, in space. It feels possible these objects may also expand and detach from this current orbit at some point — possibly separating out to join new orbits, or one day finding themselves together in a new future arrangement. This entire ‘dance’ is suggestive of the phenomenological flux we all exist in, though we may not be aware of it. Sensations and movements pass in and over one another, meeting for a moment in time, before continuing on. The rocks absorb it all – holding their own image, and the image of the world around it.
The video works that are embedded into or projected onto the rocks have the slightly destabilising function of animating a large static object with a miniature landscape. Typically we are accustomed to taking in our environment in the opposite configuration – immersed in a larger sphere of sensation dotted with apparently static objects. The effect is again a simulation of certain devices western cultures have designed to help us ‘know’ the vast and ‘unknowable’ natural world in a logical (generally colonial) way.
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies on a rock, 2022, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Among these devices are the Claude Glass, used by tourists in the 18th century to view the landscape with one’s back to it – over the shoulder through a handheld black glass mirror – desaturating and framing the landscape into a more knowable format akin to a painting or photograph. Turner-Carroll appropriates the black glass giving it the dual function of screen and mirror; reflecting the gallery and surrounds on one side, and on the other side holding a projected moving image.
A series of videos find their resting place here on the black glass – in each of them, a young female body is pictured in slow motion distorting itself in its effort pushing against the weight and size of a large rock. The rocks are those found in the township of Seydisfjordur. To an outsider they may have been placed there for aesthetic purposes. However, as Turner-Carroll learned, the township was built around these very rocks. In fact Icelandic folklore warns against moving rocks at all and Icelanders hold a deep reverence for the rocks, believing them to be spirited by sentient beings.
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies on a rock, 2022, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
The videos extrapolate a meeting between animal and mineral. There is a poetic absurdity to this gesture. In the course of each recorded action the bodies’ efforts and intentions seem to shift between an attempt to move the rock, an attempt to mould the rock, and eventually a surrender or melting into the rock. The bodies undergo a gradual process of becoming rock.
In other videos dotted among the rocks we see Turner-Carroll drawing on devices such as the steadicam to decentralise the eye as the dominant sense receptor; and appropriating the visual tools and aesthetic of sports culture. Filmed in an indoor gymnasium, these videos further question and suggest an expansion of what might constitute a ‘landscape’, and how we come to ‘know’ that landscape.
To what extent do the parquetry floorboards, the boundary markings on the courts, and the equipment used in the gymnasium signify their own kind of internal landscape? After all, sport is another structured framework societies have developed in order to engage with the natural world. In many cases sport provides an outlet for the more animal or instinctive urges of our bodies and psyche. Athleticism and competitive play are qualities that we allow ourselves to access or unleash through sport, rather than at large in our civilised existence.
In a further two video works Turner-Carroll engages other sensing organs, such as limbs and skin cells, in an effort to bypass the overbearing eye and brain in knowledge-forming. He asks: is it possible to absorb the energy of mountain berries, or historically accepted theories of the concrete world, through body parts other than those upper orifices of eyes, ears, and mouth? Adhering fruit or a philosophy text to the body with sticky tape in an attempt to absorb their knowledge may be laughable to some, but Turner-Carroll is earnestly persistent, challenging our inherited knowledge and presumptions about the order of things.
An aesthetic of tourism and leisure runs through Bodies on a Rock. These are two industries that have historically shaped our relationship to nature, and often play a large part in how we figure ourselves as separate-to or other-than nature. Turner-Carroll questions who designs our experiences as visitors to a new place; how this determines the hierarchy with which we understand or delineate natural environments; and the role capitalism plays in defining the ways we interact with them.
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies on a rock, 2022, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
Simulating an experience with nature within the landscape of the gallery, Bodies on a Rock prompts the viewer to recalibrate their dominant perception mechanisms. Neutralising and blurring the borders between categories of landscape, nature, human, machine, concreteness, sentience and language, the work encourages a more expansive view of our surroundings. For Turner-Carroll as a tourist in Iceland, the dramatic natural environment highlighted questions about how one can have an authentic experience with the landscape. In Bodies on a Rock, he explores the structured experiences of nature with an attitude that is both sincere and absurd, to invite new entry points into our perception of the worlds around us.
Shan Turner-Carroll, Bodies on a rock, 2022, installation view, dimensions variable. Photography by Jessica Maurer.
PODCAST
Shan Turner-Carroll speaks with Tesha Malott about his project, Bodies on a Rock, shown at Verge in August 2022, his practice and his creative relationship with spiritual reader Nick Foxx. Bodies On A Rock included moving images, sculptures and assemblages developed and made during an artist in residency program in the regional Icelandic town of Seyðisfjörður.
Amongst the mountains, black waterfalls and green skies, Turner-Carroll lived and worked with the experimental art community, LungA School. This experience informed the basis for Bodies on a Rock, that is the examination of nature, the body, and perception of existing colonial visions of land and the blueprints that lay within assumptions of reality.
In line with Turner-Caroll’s investigation of unearthing tacit knowledge, Bodies on a Rock questioned an inherited understanding and relationship to the non-human world, particularly through the lens of the body. As viewers navigated and self-edited their experience of the installation, their body became a site of perception and subjectivity–indeed, a landscape of its own.