Stuart’s studio resembles a carpenter’s workshop, a legacy from time in childhood spent in his father’s work spaces. A love and knowledge of a carpenter’s tools has been ingrained in him since he first explored his father’s old tools and ancestral toolboxes.
Collecting found objects from his walks across Dartmoor, from junk shops and from places of work, his materials naturally find their role. Coming together in bundles and constructions over time, Turner allows them to manifest in different combinations until their true form is found.
Turner’s process taps into a ‘present’ that is unique to him. Mindfulness practice, and the legacy of a work sustained head injury, allows access to an immediacy and a realignment of short term memory ability, which has enabled an instinctiveness within his practice.
WORDS
From my notebook:
‘A Parallel Reality version of my life, all this...the tools I need, the jobs I do.
All similar, but different, as in dreams.
The toolkits work and make sense in this place, my actions are abstract and asymmetrical, non-linear, but make total sense to me.
Do I reside here all the time? Or do I just visit and bring the experiences to bear on ordinary reality time and experience. Does this benefit me? how does it? how do I know?
...between worlds....’
From my notebook:
‘In the 1870's, in the Hebridies, along with the education acts came text books containing pictures of cricket bats, train stations and street lamps, all unrecognisable to the children of the Gaelic Western Isles.
The intentional stillness, the in-between stuff, the breaths, the pauses, the silences, the non-doings that are not about being productive, not about accumulation’
From my notebook:
'And then, almost everywhere, a clear and subtle illumination that lent magnificence to life and peace to death, was overwhelmed in the hard glare of technology. Yet that light is always present, like the stars of noon.
Man is to perceive it if he is to transcend his fear of meaninglessness, for no amount of 'progress' can take its place. We have outsmarted ourselves, like greedy monkeys, and now we are full of dread.'
Bespoke Items
I have a background of working with people in a healing context, through the medium of making.
I can work in a commission context to create items that can be used in a personal practice context, supporting ritual or meditative enquiry.
These can be tools and vessels for gathering and holding natural and sacred items so they can be actively worked with alongside and within an active practice, for example, Shamanic journeying and healing and other forms of practice in non-ordinary reality.