Stuart Turner

Lives and works in United Kingdom

Artist statement

Parallel Reality Toolkits: This body of work explores the spaces between tools as practical, linear resources for human development and problem solving and the and the symbolic, cultural and personal references with which they become imbued over time, with use, wear and obsolescence. Ancestral, dormant hand tools discovered at the bottom of old toolboxes are repurposed and given new meaning. They become fused and bound together with others to become magical components in a landscape of new forms, connected now to charm, heal, restore and navigate towards a new, less well defined purpose. New tool bundles are resources for asymmetrical solutions and methods that are long forgotten, or were possibly never real or have yet to be realised...the cultural artefacts of a people who never existed, or the collected and taxonomised remnants of an historical display discovered in the back of a dusty provincial museum's display case... They are testament to the separation and intense solitude we are creating for ourselves in this world where linear thinking, progress and mechanisation lead us towards being the instruments of our own dissolution. These Parallel Reality Toolkits are unfamiliar bundles of strangely familiar things, lashed together and fused into new forms; eccentric, hopeful, magical, lost and wilfully impractical. Stuart Turner Sep 2022

Artwork