Christine Turner
Contemplating the seven days of creation and their biblical source, Christine Turner discovered the geometry of the spheres. She entered their dimensions and become a solitary player in the game of Order and Chaos. The Creation Series is a painted record of the game in progress.
The eleven works of The Creation Series were arresting in their unconventional exhibition space, normally the bare mezzanine walls of a regional university's administration area. Curator Joan Winter brokered the opportunity for Turner's paintings to be shown during a 'Women in Research' conference at Central Queensland University, Bundaberg. In a short catalogue essay, Winter emphasises the artist's ongoing exploration of art, science and religion and explains that her imagery is 'developed by a breaking down of a circle shape into smaller and smaller geometric shapes until a [repeating infinity pattern], or repeatable tile emerges'.
Turner's recurring themes of memory, internal narrative and the metaphysical world have elsewhere been represented in assemblage using dozens of dolls and installation formats which, on one occasion, included a phantasmagorical Victorian walk-in kaleidoscope. In The Creation Series these thematic traces are simply expressed in painted and collaged geometric forms.
Importantly, Turner reveals her game of 'Order' and 'Chaos' through the medium of women's fancywork, which she does not hesitate to valorise. Reclaiming endless items of outdated discards-quilted cushion fabric, plastic lace tablecloths and , most successfully in The Creation Series, a 'feminine' preference for flocked and embossed wallpaper-it is the surface textures of these objects that interact with the meta-narrative embedded in her geometric compositions.
Such interior furnishings, once sadly baroque and passe, are refashioned with stained, muted colour into repeating stars, lozenges squares-in-circles and larger pentagons. Turner's considered