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I entered the back gallery at Greenaway where Christine Turner's fifteen assemblages were on show and thought "oh Frida". The large galvanized iron cross and the explosions of fake bows bearing the copperplate-scripted word Mother, the hearts, crosses and plastic flowers that make up Christine Turner's The Martyr's Wall have that over-the-top exuberance and excess that is associated with Mexico and its artist Frida Kahlo, with shrines and religious kitsch. A set of wooden steps lead up to the cross. Two wasp-waisted torsos (Sentinels 1 & 2) covered in dressmaking patterns and affixed with gauze butterflies stand guard in front of the wall. Among the obsessions of women's magazines called up by Turner's imagery and materials are body-shape, motherhood, food and a safe decorative femininity. 'Mother' means dieting, means a waist your father could put his hands around, means floral perfume and a flair for simplistic morality, not to mention martyrdom. 'Mother' is both attractive and repulsive . In these works Turner combines femininity and death in celebration.
The work bathes in symbols of a fluffy femininity, and also in lots of tawdry plastic rubbish (is this an indictment of women as consumers, as progenitors of junk and frippery?), abject materials like extruded foam and deadly dolls' heads, a visceral linkage with the grim games and high stakes of childhood. Opposite The Martyr's Wall is Remembrance, a type of plastic corset draped in tulle. Next to the corset is the work called simply Mother, a plastic shelf with a number of layers in which masses of plastic things, fruit, flowers and so on are united. I recall Susan Norrie's Triptych: fruitful corsage; bridal bouquet; lingering veils (1983) which also seemed