Annie Turner

Recollection • Ceramic, fishing net and feather

Annie Turner’s sensitive ceramic forms reflect on the tidal rhythms, natural meanderings and contrasting landscapes of the River Deben in Suffolk. She takes her inspiration from the ordinary workings of the river with its flowing channels, and mud flats, its sluice gates, nets and groynes responding to its essential spirit, creating hauntingly fragile porcelain, earthenware vessels and contemplative objects.

Where humans have imposed their will on the marshlands, attempting to tame the water’s flow and shape the surrounding meadows, Annie Turner’s vessels and sculptural forms simultaneously sense the transient and timelessness quality of this remote part of East Anglia. Attuned to the changes in the quality of the light and the shifting terrain, as much as the impact of the seasons, her work captures the spirit of the landscape.

Feathers, fossilised fragments of shark teeth and salty tide lines are nature’s subtle residue, observed and recorded in Turner’s series of Meander Bowls and Eddy Spoons. Composed as a sinuous group they suggest the water flowing gently through the creeks, or rushing, twisting and circling at full flood. Longer spoons, with bridge handles, suggest the nurturing interplay between land and river.

Annie’s delicate earthenware caged structures underline the ephemeral nature of decaying ladders and sinkers. She has a unique ability to distil the permanence and resistance of coastal structures and imbue them with a vulnerability.