Proof Intangible (Interview with Nancy Kay Turner)
Toti O’Brien
Nancy Kay Turner is a visual artist and art critic. A graduate of Queens College, the University of California at Berkeley, and The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, she studied painting with Elmer Bischoff, Peter Saul, and R.B. Kitaj.
Her mixed media works have been exhibited locally, nationally, and internationally. They can be found in private, public, and corporate collections (including Warner Brothers Studios, ABC Studio, and Chiat/Day Advertising Agency). ARTPIC gallery represents her work.
Turner’s critical reviews and essays have been published by a number of art magazines. A transcription of her artist lecture at The Oceanside Museum of Art (on the artist Roland Reiss) is archived at The Smithsonian Museum. She lives in Pasadena, California, with her husband, Hoyt Hilsman.
I met Nancy Kay Turner in 2022, on the occasion of our dual exhibit at Roswell Space, “Still Water.” Her work resonated with me immediately. She and I were there early, so I asked a few questions that she was glad to answer. Many exchanges on art and life have followed on occasions of other events, shows, or studio visits. The following conversation was prompted by “Sigma,” a show featuring work by Nancy Kay Turner and Michael Falzone, also at Roswell Space.
Toti O’Brien: Some of your collages/assemblages have plain, neutral backgrounds. Many, though, imply elaborate substrates of paper, cardboard, cloth, and other materials that you alter through labor-intensive, time-consuming processes. Tinted, textured, torn, crumpled, layered, they become complex landscapes of their own. I am enthralled by the balance and strength of your composition, texture, color palette — even at a distance, unaware still of the subtle narrative of figure-and-fragment that a close-up reveals. In addition to being a visionary, enigmatic storyteller, you are a refined abstract artist. How do these sensibilities combine?
Nancy Kay Turner: I was trained by the Abstract-Expressionists, but I was never an ABEX painter. I was a figurative artist, painting scenes of my studio or my living room where there were no people, but one sensed that they had just stepped out of the frame... I believe, though, that the legacy of Abstract-Expressionism is conveyed by my reliance on gesture, chance, paint/ink manipulation sans object. Chance and intention coexist in the making of my work, and ABEX embraces contradiction. Andrew Wyeth (who is thought to be a realist — indeed, an illustrator) has a great quote: “My struggle is to preserve the abstract flash like something out of the corner of your eye.”
TO: You certainly preserve it, and not just like a flash. Rather, like a solid root system or a healthy backbone. Do you begin from the background? Do the colors and texture of the under layers influence the narrative? Or do you identify the narrative elements (photography, text, found objects) and then conceive a substrate?
Nancy Kay Turner, “Kokytus: River of Lamentation,” Installation, 2023
NKT: There is no simple answer to your question. Sometimes, a narrative emerges and demands materials that I might not have but need to create, find, or buy. Sometimes I buy materials that interest me but I have no plans for, and they have no connection to what I am doing at the moment. They are “from the future,” meaning they will find a place in my work ten, twenty years later — or else two weeks later. I might keep substrates in my studio for years, while they are looking for a home. I have bits, pieces and fragments that start small and sometimes get bigger. The waxed paper scrolls that I used for the “Incantation” show, for instance, were created in 2017 and gradually added to. I knew I wanted to do something with them, but it wasn’t until I rescued a huge bolt of silver metallic fabric left out in the rain (the perfect substrate for the scrolls) that the piece morphed into “Kokytus: River of Lamentation.” Appropriately, the substrate began to erode and was no longer metallic, so I had to add many more layers of dyed/painted wax paper to make a stronger piece.
I might happen to get a fixed number of something. For example, I received twelve small rectangular metal pieces, and I knew at once I would build a series around that material. It became “Ghosts and Unintended Consequences,” which was shown at Wonzimer as part of my installation “Lethe: The River of Forgetting.” I like to predetermine the length of a series based on the materials I have sourced, which are usually finite.
I might use the same wallpaper, for instance, to create a body of work that is visually, as well as conceptually, connected, though I try to never duplicate designs or patterns. I don’t take notes or make plans. I value the Dada and Surrealists interest in tracing the marvelous, tapping into the subconscious in order to avoid repetition. The under layers that form my substrates are fluid, as I rip and reorder pieces... hence, the narrative is fluid as well. I often take pictures as I go, to preserve a record of the changes that occur. As Leonardo Da Vinci famously said, “Paintings are never finished, rather they are abandoned.” And that is how a series ends.
TO: I love the intuitive nature of your process and the intense, quasi-magical relationship you have with the materials. Once, though, you said that you are both a right- and a left-brain person. How so?
NKT: As a writer and artist, I am both left- and right-brained. As a writer, my process is consciously meticulous. It involves finding quotes in order to frame my inquiry, as well as doing research to confirm my opinions. I have to know where exactly I’m going, write everything out, revise and reread, rework until it flows. I read my text aloud to see how it sounds. I almost obsessively cross out words, or else change their sequence. I joke that I’m Marcel Proust looking for “le mot juste,” the exact word.
With my artwork (though it often incorporates text), I access areas where language doesn’t exist. Only action, reaction, flow, and observation do. When I am “in a zone,” I am not thinking consciously. If my mind intervenes and language enters the equation, I find the resulting work stale or ordinary, while my quest is to make the ordinary extraordinary. G.K. Chesterton said, “There is a road from the eye to the heart that doesn’t go through the intellect.” I remember being in a fourth grade math class and watching dust particles dance in a slice of sunlight, rather than focusing on the blackboard. Like Monet said... when I make art, “I am an eye.”
TO: Tell me about something that catches your eye, then, and charms you like the dust particles did.
NKT: Sure. I am fascinated by old layers of paint. When we painted my kitchen, we saw decades of colors from different eras — a certain green from the thirties, often found in glass, sea foam and salmon from the early fifties, then avocado green from the seventies. Each stratum revealed so much history, almost like tree rings do.
Nancy Kay Turner, “Electric Shoe Last,” (detail), Assemblage, 2018
TO: I can see the importance of layers in your work, and will come back to them. But I want to talk a bit more about structure/process. You usually proceed “part to whole,” and this is most evident in large pieces built out of household residue. “Burnt Offerings,” for instance, combines 104 parchment sheets on which you baked bread during the pandemic. Those seemingly identical items are endowed with subtle diversity — the ensemble they form is all but monotonous or mechanic. How did you achieve it? What guided you?
NKT: Each parchment rectangle I used for “Burnt Offerings” had a distinctive mark, like a fingerprint, and I started to collage under and over some of them. The 104 sheets form a loose grid... To me, it suggests a calendar of sorts, and that is how I ended up viewing it. I learned about the power of the grid from seeing Louis Nevelson’s mixed media wood sculptures when I lived in New York. The boxes that she used provided the structure, and in each one there were multiple forms. She held everything together by repetition, the grid, and keeping the palette simple — either black, white, or gold.
TO: You also create unity with your color choices, which are varied but often include black, brown, sepia, rust. When I first saw your art, I noticed a theme of combustion. As I asked about it, you mentioned echoes of the Shoah, which, as I got more acquainted with your work, became undeniable. Fire and water, in fact, are both involved in/evoked by your artistic practice. Are they sources of inspiration, motifs, media?
NKT: In 1982 I let someone stay in my house, and she caused a fire. I lost lots, lots of things, and the episode left a mark. In the 90s, I used lap cement (tar) and asphaltum (a gorgeous deep brown) in a series called “Devil’s Arithmetic,” which was about the Holocaust in a roundabout way. I embedded materials into the lap cement that would congeal, but occasionally gravity cracked the surface, which I had sprayed to be matte, forming a shiny tear, almost bloodlike... like a keloid scar. As gravity pulled on it and made it sag, the surface of the tar wrinkled, a bit like the surface of my “Burnt Offerings” installation, which also reminded viewers of aging skin. Of course, parchment paper is burned and smells burnt. Although I now use ink to dye materials, people often remark they look burned.
In the 90s, my studio flooded twice. I was working full time, writing art reviews, mothering an elementary age son... I could not be in my studio that often, so I missed the first flood. By the time I saw the second one, the water had receded. Everything on the floor was ruined, though I did save some photographs that had morphed into very interesting stuff. In 2017, I turned my home studio over to my son, and left some things outside, since it never rains in LA. After traveling for five weeks, I returned to find it had rained, and what I had left outside was entirely soaked. A small section of a roll of wax paper was dyed a dark, rich purple in a diagonal pattern. I began to roll out twenty-inch sections and tried to duplicate the pattern. I could not, but thus began my work with rolls of wax paper scrolls, which I still dye the same way. It has not escaped my attention that I am going “against the grain”... using material that is designed to be impermeable!
TO: So, water and fire are untamed factors of change. They first came uninvited, but you embraced the change and danced with it. Your answer, though, brings up yet another theme: the rescuing instinct, your impulse to salvage and cherish things that otherwise would be trashed. You once mentioned a childhood memory of your mother mending, then embellishing your stained skirt — how that marked you. Do you see a link between your poetics of rescue and, perhaps, lack or penury suffered by the past generation?
Nancy Kay Turner, “Unbidden,” Artist Made Book, 2018
NKT: My parents lived through the depression, but they were fun loving and had great taste. We didn’t have much money, but we were dressed wonderfully. So my interest in vintage narrative objects is partly a result of the aesthetic sense I developed as a child. I have a deep connection to vintage materials, which I find to be breathtakingly beautiful even if damaged. Curiosity is also at play... the hunting element, the thrill of unearthing an overlooked object and sneaking it home. I am a gleaner, wandering the aisles of unlit thrift stores, searching for hidden treasures. It is also true that when I was a child we lived in apartments, and my mother threw everything out for lack of storage room. Because we had no objects from the past, I have the impulse of saving things from obscurity as if they were cherished friends. My interest in most materials is driven by a form of spirituality... these forsaken objects fascinate me. They speak to me.
TO: Your art certainly carries their voice! Sometimes, a single object, 3-D fragment (feather, spectacles, coiled rope, door hinge, play card, rosary) emerges from a collage with a poignant effect, as if to deliberately invoke the dialectic of memory and memento. I am referring to the vagueness of mental representations — their tendency to fool us — as opposed to the tangibility of residue that can stand examination, allow reconstruction, bear witnessing. Your work is openly themed after memory, but it technically employs mementos. How do these two entities combine?
NKT: I think of memory as fictional and slippery. We remember through photographs or by stories others tell us. I never saw the movie Rashomon, but its theme always fascinated me. In the movie, three people witness the same event, but remember it differently. Memory is a function of perception, and it isn’t fixed. To me it seems tingling, alive...
Susan Sontag, in her book On Photography, says that all photographs are memento mori... I usually don’t think of my pieces as mementos. Recently, one of them was framed differently than I intended, and it looked like a treasured souvenir. I am pondering how that shifted its meaning, and I still don’t have an answer. Sometimes, though, I think of my work of the 90s — which dealt with the Holocaust in an abstract, metaphorical way — as a witness to history, especially since my own background is so shrouded and incomplete in that regard.
TO: Well, some of your works include displays of shoe lasts, which inevitably convey camp-related imagery: the pile shown in the Auschwitz Museum, a similar mound on sight at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial, the bronze shoes on the Budapest Danube promenade. I am sure those references are deliberate. Still, you don’t incorporate shoes but shoe lasts. Does it make a difference? They are made of sturdier matter, contrasting the fragility of leather, cloth, string. They are skeleton rather than skin. Also, they hint more at the foot, for which they substitute, than the shoe does.
Nancy Kay Turner, “Séance Series; Two Madres,” Mixed Media, 2022
NKT: I am Pisces, which astrologically rules the feet. The shoe has been an integral part of my work for decades. In the late 70s and early 80s, I used a rubber stamp high-heeled shoe as my stand-in, the way Jim Dine used his bathrobe. The shoes in Holocaust museums and those on the Danube banks are a subtext, but so are Eleanor Anton’s one hundred boots — shoes are also a feminist trope. Mostly, they are potent symbols and metaphors, as in “walk a mile in someone’s shoes” — as a way to connect with another’s identity and human journey.
I purchased shoe lasts for the invitational show at Shoebox Galleries (we were asked to make a piece out of a shoebox), and they led to my first sculptural assemblage, “Shoe Diva.” Since, my collection kept growing. Once I had twenty-five vintage show lasts, I began to incorporate them into larger pieces. They are stamped and dated, like passports, documents, letters, and I’ve collected dated material for decades. They are time travelers, though the people who made them are long gone.
TO: Shoes (and shoe lasts alike) come in pairs. Doubles and doppelgängers are often found in your work — sometimes referenced by your titles, mostly expressed by two figures facing, juxtaposing, mirroring one another. Often, they sport a “double face” — their features are split, cleaved, overlapped, carved, superimposed. They are themselves and someone else. They are each two persons, or else not what they seem to be. Who are they? Who are they not?
NKT: Interesting question. Again, Pisces is two fish headed in opposite directions, and I’m Gemini Rising — the twins! Maybe it’s the left-brained writer and the right-brained artist coexisting in one person... I often, randomly, find two images of the same person, which lead to some of the imagery that you reference. It is only recently, especially in “Ghosts and Unintended Consequences,” that I began to play with faces and started to bend genders, layering male and female parts to create a whole. It is a relatively new experience.
TO: Still, your work is full of dualities — at least polarities — of which you are well aware. Can you name some?
Nancy Kay Turner, Ghosts and Unintended Consequences Series; Whisper of Memory,” Mixed Media Collage on Panel, 2023
NKT: Absence/presence, lost/found, memory/forgetting. I examine the tension between nostalgia and re-invention. As we said in the beginning, my process toggles between chaos and control, intuition and formal considerations. Also, it plays with conceal/reveal. Here’s a story about how the power of this pair was “revealed to me.” I had a solo show in San Diego at the Spectrum Gallery, circa mid-70s. I showed mixed media works on paper gridded with translucent tape on which hand-written notes about a brief relationship appeared. I decided one such entry was too intimate, and crossed it out. At the opening, I noticed a group of people gathered around one of the pieces, and realized they were all trying to see what was hidden. It was an "aha” experience, one I have never forgotten — how hard viewers can work for the delight of teasing out a hidden personal note. We are all voyeuristic!
TO: Speaking of the hidden note... we have explored backgrounds, found objects and imagery, but text is also a component of your work — and I would throw titles as well into the cauldron. Your titles are intriguing and humorous. Sometimes, they offer a lead to the visual mystery. Sometimes, they bring viewers on a clever detour. How do they intersect your creative process?
NKT: Titles are important to me. Sometimes, I just come across a phrase I like, and I save it. Other times, I conjure the title of a series while I am working on it, as in the ongoing “Archeology of the Soul.” Archeologists are curious and inquiry-driven. They gather evidence in an effort to piece together our history as a species. They find, arrange, and study fragments as I do with my shards of personal correspondence and ephemera. But the soul is immaterial and cannot be contained. So the title is a poetic oxymoron and references my quest for what is ultimately unknowable. The titles of the thirty individual pieces of the series came from a book on the I Ching, the Chinese way of predicting or understanding the future. I was titling these works when the pandemic began, and those sometimes ominous lines seemed perfect — as, “In Detachment There is Freedom.” They felt like pronouncements, or portents.
Some titles spring unbidden into my mind, and I did name one of my artist books “Unbidden.” Other times, I pick out obscure text from the pieces themselves. Lyrics have crept into titles, as “Born Under A Bad Sign” — an assemblage featuring the large tintype, circa 1880, of an elderly woman with no teeth, whose severe visage reminded me of the next lines... “If it wasn’t for bad luck, you know I wouldn’t have no luck at all.” While there are no rules, I tend to use phrases that have double meanings — as in “Dark Decade,” the name for a series whose subtext was the Holocaust and whose palette of tar and asphaltum made the image literally and figuratively dark.
I spent ten years on that series, and so it was a dark decade for me as I excavated those feelings. Another earlier work from the 80s had the title “High Heel,” and featured the rubber stamp of a 1930s pump, but also included diaristic text about a man who lied and was a heel.
My desire is to pique curiosity with my title, also leaving space for the viewers to have their own experience of the work, and that’s why I generally eschew what to me seems obvious.
TO: And successfully so! I intended to touch at the layering aspect of your work, and I think the moment has come, as we have, if partially, enumerated most of the strata you skillfully overlap.
NKT: Layers in my work are concrete, actual, but also symbolic and metaphorical. As I delve through layers of history, peeling off leftovers from the domestic sphere — all saved by females, who were usually the family archivists — the stories that emerge spell out the universal themes of love, loss, longing, and desire.
I explore how identity morphs through time’s relentless passage, and how my art can collapse the space between past, present and future, creating portals through which viewers can glimpse the complexities of existence, identity, and legacy. Especially in this age of AI, when the photographs we use to remember our past are moved to the cloud, and may not survive, memory is our future.
