Henry Turner - Nobody Knows How You Soothe Me

[between the Old West Coast road and the great river, between thought and breakfast]

From a place wiped clean of all human construct, taken to an absolute flatness; in the midst of which are relics and reliquaries, visible to the walker. In the quieter time of April and May of 2020, I undertook pilgrimages across the empty lands in search of the oldest things besides the ground, which proved to be plants. This became a means of interrogating familiarity and strangeness in the place of familiar terrors. Equipped with books and apples, I set off in the morning and strolled thirty kilometres or more; and found spiked bushes bejewelled with honeyed flowers, crimson butterflies amongst bracken and a place to sit and sleep.

The use of imagery in painting is generally employed (at least by myself) as a means of exploring the nature of things or other strange ideas. It may also be described as a means of constructing an instrument, which extends until meeting some obstacle; thereby describing the shape of something without sight. A crucial stuffing of the work became apparent: the writings of Borges, of Büchner, Woolf and the poet Lorca, in addition to the music of Jimmy Blanton and Mahler, with a little of the Beethoven theme of Wendy Carlos. These things, and other more obscure structures, became the things to be protruded towards – the actuality of landscape and flora fade into mere incident, or a sound place on which to Start, but not to finish.

Nobody Knows How You Soothe Me is Henry Turner's first exhibition at Brett McDowell Gallery.