July 2022, Los Angeles
by Margaret Lazzari
“An iceberg is 10% above water and 90% below. When we talk about our work, artists all talk about the stuff above water, but we never talk about all the stuff way beneath the work. Who knows what their work will be until they do it, until they do the investigation, until they get surprised?” –Nancy Kay Turner
This article is about the whole iceberg of Nancy Kay Turner’s artwork, discussing the 10% above but also illuminating some below, including the chance occurrences and unplanned upheavals that shaped her work just as much as her conscious intention form them. –ML
The Home Studio
During Covid, everything in Nancy Kay Turner’s life rolled together when she moved her downtown LA studio to her home, and combined her working and living spaces.
Turner mused, “I spent the last two or three years thinking deeply about my artwork. Three dualistic themes keep coming up: absence/presence, lost/found, and remembering/forgetting.”
To me, the concentrated, packed feeling of her workspace, sandwiched into her living space, seemed fertile and energized.
Turner’s work is collage/assemblage. She builds pieces from keepsakes that other people have saved and eventually let go. She uses a rigid structure to “contain” her work. But within that, she combines others’ mementos intuitively and randomly, to create works that reflect the past and resonate today.
Major works emerged: the 146-page Quarantine Opus Book, the large multipart installation Burnt Offerings, the framed collage series Saving Remnants, and other individual pieces.
Quarantine Opus Book
“My first project when I moved my studio to my home was the Quarantine Opus Book,” Turner recalled. “For two months, I worked on QOB every day, which is something I’ve never done before. It was compact and focused. I did it from beginning to end on half of my dining room table.”
In Turner’s domestic studio, the collage elements took on extra meaning. Daily life, love and disaster from long ago were folded into her daily life and the evening news, like kneading dough. Time seems to repeat itself.
The collages contain fragments of old magazines, letters, family photos, maps, and bits of handwritten notes. Every element has meaning, but ripped from their original context as they are, you have to create your own stories out of them. You get the sense of watching the world from afar in page after page of distant places or distant memories. It evokes life inside our houses during Covid. The images are present before you, but they refer to everything that is absent.
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Quarantine Opus Book, completed, photographed on Turner’s dining room table, 2020.
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Quarantine Opus Book, pages 89-90, next to archives of raw materials, 2020.
The Quarantine Opus Book itself grew thick, worn, soft and stained with all the fragments glued into it. Although Turner used a new sketchbook, the curled pages seemed as old as the scraps they contained. Elements seem firmly in the past, but also of the present, for example the text “Educate your children at home.”
The entire book is like that. For example, on pages 89-90, Turner glued down several old fragments about having a mysterious cough and seeking new remedies, but it seems to apply also to the Covid era. There is also a casualty, a funeral announcement for a “father and loving husband.” The photos show the boxes of mementos from which Turner worked, intuitively and randomly, to create a new set of the lost and the found, of half-remembered events and lost memories.
Segues (Turner’s Thoughts)
“At the same time I was making QOB I started collecting the parchment sheets from baking bread. I had no plan in mind but loved the rich color and texture of the stain the bread left on parchment.”
“I work from parts to the whole. I like to use things ‘off-label.’ It gives me a charge. I like to combine fine art materials and random industrial materials.”
Saving Remnants
Turner collects other people’s memories and memorabilia and archives and attic stuff because “I have no family history of my own.” Saving Remnants is a series of large collages about lost memories.
“I ask myself why I am accumulating all these old pictures of people, often whose names and stories I do not know. What does it mean to me?” Turner questioned. “I am using their ancestors to fill the gaps in my history. I grew up in post-World War II America, in the Bronx, a Jewish person in a Jewish community. I had an older cousin with a tattoo on her arm, but we never talked about the holocaust or the past or inherited trauma.”
Other people’s remnants — magazines, postcards, letters, old photos, awards, mementos, pieces of lace — come to Turner after death has broken their chain of attachment. Clearly these things were once precious to someone, but over time they still end up in thrift stores or garage sales, and finally, they may find their way to Turner’s art table. What others may see as just trash, Turner sees as rich resources.
Saving Remnants turned out to be a bigger project than the QOB. For this set of collages, the raw materials were stacked all over the table, on the seats of the chairs and on the floor, all least one foot deep. They spilled over to three other tables and under a tent outside her house. Her workspaces, inside and outside her house, had a packed, concentrated intensity like her work itself.
The Saving Remnants collages develop their own meanings through the recombination of remains that Turner noted “contain ghostly vestiges of the people to whom they belong.” The term “remnant” carries multiple meanings here that is not limited just to Turner’s habits of collecting.
“There are multiple interpretations possible in the names of all my art series. The remnant is a recurring theme in early Judeo-Christian texts referring to what is left of a community after a catastrophe,” said Turner. The remnant, however, is not just those survivors but it points to the absent ones, those who were lost.
Skeleton Key, June 1910 Ohio, and Gastronomic Déjà vu are three collages from the Saving Remnants series. A beautiful artist paper forms the substrate for the works, with fibers running through it that suggest roots, links, and meshes. In contrast to those organic fibers, the next layer features some aged wallpaper with vertical stripes, which looks like the ticking that covers old mattresses. The empty mattress is a kind of stand-in for the person who is missing. Other papers, small cards, and fabrics step the space down smaller and smaller until, toward the middle, there is a small evocative photo — a family group, a small boy, and older woman — faces for which you have to search, barely there, faded and worn. Remembered, forgotten.
Like all in the Saving Remnants series, Gastronomic Déjà vu contains a crazy array of element: chunky kuzo paper, vintage wallpaper, 1940s playing cards, stained parchment paper, framed vintage photograph, vintage cookbook pages, and a 1934 piece of roofing material. Turner says, “I realize now how much the images are from the domestic sphere – not just the baking but cookbook recipes and assembling photo albums . . . was probably the woman’s job. The playing cards are games of chance (always a theme in my work . . . chance and randomness) but also represent a time before TV when people entertained themselves with cards and pianos . . . and played in their parlors. So the themes really represent family recreation and roles before the advent of modern distractions.”
Segues
“I was a figurative painter for years at the beginning of my career. And then in time the figure began to ‘step out’ of my work. I’d intend to paint the figure but by the end the person had left and only their hat remained.”
“I think of Hiroshima and the people pulverized, disintegrated, by the atomic bomb. A ghostly stain or remnant is all that is left.”
“When I made bread during the pandemic lockdown, I must have burned myself dozens of times.”
“I found my old art notebooks from the 1990s. In one I referred to a work that I made, but I don’t remember it and have no record of it. It was called ‘Burnt Offering.’ I had made it but then forgot it and then in the past few years I remade it.”
Burnt Offerings
For Turner, new ideas start from the things she collects. In this case, in March 2020, the collection was of the parchment sheets that line the pans for baking bread. These sheets were just trash, of no value at all, but Turner found them to be “beautiful and mysterious,” the ghostly residue of something no longer there. She saved them.
“Everyone was making bread during the pandemic,” recalled Turner. “That made a connection among people who were themselves in isolation. People posted photos of their bread on social media. There was a moment there. Making bread was always understood as a complicated thing. Hard to get right, easy to flop. In fact, it turns out to be easy, just four ingredients.”
By January of 2021, Turner started collaging onto the red parchment sheets and working with them as a grid. This became Burnt Offerings, made with 104 stained parchment baking sheets attached to muslin backing. The used sheets are fragile, wrinkled, and thin, like the skin of the elderly, a reminder of another meaning of parchment from centuries ago when books were handwritten on sheets of animal skin.
Each of the 104 sheets of baking parchment is similarly stained by the round loaf that baked on it. Each is a rectangle with a round imprint in the center. They are ordinary, but they bring to mind ghostly images like the Shroud of Turin or the shadows of those vaporized by the atomic bombs.
To me, the bread stains look like heads or faces (perhaps ancestors?) or like the grid of ghostly heads in a work by Marlene Dumas. Individual ones may look like pie slices or sunspots (the sun as a furnace, baking bread). The stains, in relation to furnaces, also bring to mind World War II’s holocaust, when the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims. Burnt offerings were food and animals burnt in offering to God. They also resemble the cells that make up animals and humans, the messy “stuff” of life.
Bread has sacred connotations, as do burnt offerings. Breaking bread. Bread of life. Tragedy and nourishment.
Turner used copper staples like stitches to assemble the pieces. These made either paths or barriers between parchment sheets. Slipped into the “pita pockets” formed by the muslin and parchment are bits of things into which people have poured out their hearts – a memento, words (“Mother” or “Everything gonna work out fine”), a touchstone. Scatterings of glitter here and there, along with some scraps of gold leaf, suggest the emotions that someone, somewhere, invested in these now-discarded items.
Some observers see Turner’s grid as a calendar. Each vertical strip represents a month. Each rectangle represents a week in the two-year Covid lockdown. All together, they become a record of a life, pieced together, quilt-like.
Even now, old works lead to new. “A month or two ago, I thought I was done with baking bread and saving the parchment sheets. But now I know I am not. I want to bake enough bread to wrap four walls with parchment sheets. This will be a massive undertaking. I am just thinking of how many loaves of bread that will be, how long that will take, and then mounting all those sheets on fabric. Right now, Burnt Offerings strips are nailed to the wall at the top and hang freely at the bottom, responding to the drafts created when people move around it. But I may want to think some more about how these pieces hang.”
Segues
“Water is my accomplice.”
“I work with paper. You use water to make paper. It’s a way to melt down the pulp and remake it.”
“I use things altered through heat and water. There is a lot of randomness and chance in that. But I also set precise restrictions for the entire piece. Like the QOB — there were a certain number of pages, the size of each page is exactly the same, I filled one page and then moved on to the next, in a linear fashion, until the end. I work between restrictions and chance.”
“Baking alters one thing into another. And sometimes it results in spontaneous images — Jesus in the tortilla, Mary in the toast. And of course, we have David Hammons’ body print works.”
“I am an accidental archivist.”
“Usually, I move back and forth between bodies of work. I keep making things with no purpose, until eventually I am surprised by my own work.”
“I am attracted to fabric but I don’t sew and I don’t want to learn to sew. I get chunks of fabric given to me, or someone throws them out and I pick them up. And sometimes I figure out what to do with them in a work.”
Details from the archives.
Papers and Paint and Panels
While collage is the most typical element of Turner’s work, she also uses wood panels or heavy paper as a means of framing or providing a foundation for her works.
She ages and works these conventional art materials to complement her collages. Abstract or gestural paint lend an overall mood to the work, sometimes playful, sometimes ominous. Many works, like Saving Remnants, are mounted on beautiful papers with mulberry fibers. Other works are built up on very contemporary, synthetic Yupo paper, heavily worked over with ink. Other works with more three-dimensional elements are on cradled wood panels.
Her flat artworks on paper are perhaps the closest to conventional collages. Other more substantial works are like relief sculptures on wood panels encrusted with curios, mementos, and framed photos. Her books are time-based experiences for the viewer, although time may not be linear in them, and may run forward, backwards or in circles.
All of her work, however, speaks of the stubborn persistence of life, the poignancy of decay, the transformations caused by time, and the embodiment of memory in objects we make.
Grids often underly Turner’s works, which reference the boxes that contain archival material and also the spatial organization behind many systems. Because of this, two works like An Immovable Veil of Black and Luck of the Draw, which couldn’t be more different, nevertheless feel linked and share a common aesthetic. Their size and background paper are the same, and elements are organized around rectangles. They both contain elements of games, and they share a common color palette.
Inside both is a whole world of memories to explore. The left work, An Immovable Veil of Black, looks like a ruin, a place of disaster, a house of dead souls. The images are cards from an artist’s deck that featured mutants or freaks which Turner dyed until they transformed. What seems to be a burnt plank is a piece of paper that she found in the street, water-soaked and water-transformed.
The work on the right, Luck of the Draw, seems much more intact and less distressed. In addition to the base paper with dried flower petals, there are patterned papers and a photo of a smiling woman, all only slightly aged. Yet her eyes are blocked, and she seems distant and unreachable. The five tiles surrounding her are from mah-jongg, a game that requires skills, observation, adaptive strategies, and memory, but also with a fundamental element of chance. What was this woman’s fate?
The recurring motif of layers keeps returning to me: the layers of raw materials on Turner’s work table; the layers of artworks, stacked one on another; the layers of pages in a book; and within each individual work, the layers of elements.
They are layered works made out of simple materials, papers, common scraps, useless scraps and old scraps of things in trunks. Like mirrored surfaces made of hundreds of little facets, they are both the things they are and they are also little memory triggers. Those triggers can bring up to the collective consciousness the big events of our times, and to the individual, memories of our own life stories.
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Margaret Lazzari is a painter, writer, and Professor Emerita of Art at the University of Southern California’s Roski School of Art and Design.
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