Entering Meredith Turnbull’s recent installation, The Edible Woman, at Melbourne’s West Space, I got the distinct impression of having just walked into a rather fabulous cocktail party in which an eclectic ensemble of characters were deep in the throes of stimulating conversation. Rather than your usual party guests however, this particular gathering was populated by a suite of pared back sculptural forms assembled throughout the space, including a series of segmented metal columns coated in matt black or grey, blocky timber forms, suspended black discs, a series of collaged panels and an elongated vertical sculpture comprised of what looked like enlarged papier mâché lozenges tittering precariously atop one another.
Just as the ‘cocktail party’ was born in the early stages of the last millennium, Turnbull has developed a distinct formal language which is heavily informed by avant-garde and craft practices of the early to mid-twentieth century. Working within the realms of both jewellery and fine art, she utilises a range of reduced geometric forms inspired by these traditions which she has reworked and redeployed in a variety of scales and configurations across divergent exhibition contexts in recent years. Whether intimately sized wearable pieces or more monumental forms, her practice consistently evidences a concern with the way objects relate to the body. In The Edible Woman the sculptural forms loomed just larger than human scale, so that one was forced to physically negotiate a path around them. An accompanying wall painting of mutely coloured semi-circles that snaked its ways around the perimeters of the space, established an undulating rhythm that helped carry the viewer through the installation.
The surface detail of the wall panels and papier mâché sculpture, constructed from