Meredith Turnbull, artist

A few Saturdays ago, we featured Australian artist Meredith Turnbull’s incredible, powder-coated brass jewelry, but today we wanted to turn your attention to her equally terrific art practice. Navigating her website, we became intrigued by images of totemic metallic structures that were nevertheless labeled as photography. We asked Turnbull herself to clarify: “My practice as an artist has really been shaped by my training: first studying photography, then doing a degree in Art History, then later a degree in Fine Art specializing in gold and silversmithing. This affected the way I work and made me very interested in ideas in and around discipline, functionality, art and design history, and of course context!”

“I’m preoccupied with theories and ideas about purposeful objects and their relationship to people as well as new contexts for those ideas. So I make objects across a variety of scales. Sometimes I photograph these but only exhibit the photograph; sometimes I show small objects alongside larger installation work. I’m always trying to work with scale and the context in which I’m exhibiting, like showing photographs and objects of small-scale work in contemporary art spaces or large-scale sculpture that deals with the image in photography galleries. I use a variety of materials and techniques, drawing from traditional gold and silversmithing as well as larger-scale timber, metal, and concrete construction/fabrication processes.” Turnbull currently has an exhibition up at the Melbourne gallery Pieces of Eight, where her jewelry is also stocked. See more of her great work below, then follow along on her Instagram for images of new work.

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