In the quietude of an 18th-century chapel at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, artist Nicola Turner has staged a visceral intervention. Her latest work, *Time’s Scythe*, is a sprawling, site-responsive installation that appears to grow from the building’s very architecture. It begins its intrusion from the exterior, spilling from the bell tower and snaking through an upper window before cascading over the interior balcony and into the nave, where it settles in a series of sinuous, bulbous forms.
Turner’s choice of medium is a deliberate engagement with what she terms "material memory." The installation is constructed from individual tendrils of raw wool and horsehair, encased in mesh and stitched into dense, fleshy masses. While the wool is locally sourced, the horsehair carries a more intimate history, reclaimed from antique upholstery and mattresses that have spent generations in close contact with human bodies. To Turner, these organic materials are "dead matter" that nonetheless retain a latent, atavistic energy.
The sensory experience of the work is intended to be immersive. The earthy scent of the raw fibers fills the chapel, while the sight of sheep grazing in the surrounding landscape—the source of the installation’s primary material—blurs the boundary between the artwork and the environment. At the terminus of several tendrils, traditional sheep shears reach toward the altar like skeletal claws, a nod to the park’s own agricultural traditions and the cyclical nature of life and labor.
*Time’s Scythe* remains on view at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park Chapel through September 27, 2026.
With reporting from Designboom.
Source · Designboom
