Beds I 2007

Alison Turnbull (b.1956)
British Council Collection
Moon-Viewing Platform 2010

Alison Turnbull (b.1956)
Southampton City Art Gallery
Beds III 2007

Alison Turnbull (b.1956)
British Council Collection

Born in Bogotá, Alison Turnbull left Colombia at age two and returned as a teenager. 'My years in Colombia were formative and important,' she goes on to describe the Latin American architecture she was surrounded by and tell me about school visits to Museo del Oro, where she saw the glow of El Dorado gold, and family trips to tierra caliente, full of colour. 'You can't ever really know what's influenced you, some things happen by osmosis,' she explains.

When she was growing up, Turnbull's parents worked for an NGO. Following their postings, she spent her childhood moving around Latin America, Asia, North Africa and the USA. At 17, she moved to Madrid alone, where she studied at Academia Arjona and reconnected with the Spanish language and Hispanic culture. 'Growing up multilingual', Turnbull tells me, 'gives you a sense that things are unfixed, it gives you an openness'.

This openness is evident in her work, but so is an underlying desire for structure. Walking the line between order and chaos, Turnbull navigates the natural and built worlds using ready-made and found materials. Though she considers herself primarily an abstract painter, Turnbull has made significant works using drawing, editions, architecture, radio and more.

Nichol Keene: You collect notebooks and stationery from all over the world. Can you tell me about your relationship with these materials?

Alison Turnbull: I like things to be fairly uncluttered, but I've always collected exercise books and paper stationery of all kinds. About 15 years ago, I thought I'd better start using them. I picked out a notebook from Palermo, which had a beautiful blue cover and gridded pages. Wherever there was an intersection in the grid, I drew a circle. That was the start of the project I call Exercises. It grew from there, and the drawings continue to proliferate – now over 300 of them.

You might think of the grid as uniform, standard, yet there are countless tiny differences. In France, for example, they use five millimetre squares for their grids, but in Italy, it's four millimetres – as a result, my drawings on Italian paper are more condensed.

Nichol: The way you speak about the grid makes me think of the [Francophone literary movement] Oulipo – does it act as a useful constraint for you, or is it almost meditative? Also, how is drawing connected to your paintings and works in other mediums?

Alison: At first, I resisted the idea of the drawings being meditative because that suggested an absence of conscious thought. The minute I lose concentration, I lose the drawing. The process may be meditative but it's very focused. And, yes, Oulipo... Georges Perec's Species of Spaces is a very important book for me. I think when you put constraints on yourself, the gains can be huge.

Some time ago, I became intrigued by architectural plans and drawings as a way of understanding space. There was a specific way that architects looked at space – a sort of godlike view, where you could be everywhere at once. It seemed so different to how one actually moves through space, and its connection to memory.

Houses into Flats came out of my fascination with architectural plans as abstractions. The paintings are like transcriptions – from blueprint to canvas. The image or the design, if you like, of each painting is given by the found material, but the variables within that are infinite. It was a rich way of exploring all the formal things I was interested in; light, colour, geometry – while bringing in something of the world beyond the studio. I imagined the various building types in the series as evoking a town or a settlement.

I made Field Hospital from a plan for a First World War field hospital. I wanted colours of bandages, bodily fluids and disease. In a painting, those colours can be quite beautiful.

There's an excitement in using something found, a tension between my role as an abstract painter and the source material. There is a sense of one thing becoming another. It's akin to translation. I grew up with two languages, and I've always been interested in translation.

Nichol: Can you tell me more about how else you've worked with ideas of translation?

Alison: Just after Houses into Flats, I made a book called Spring Snow – A Translation. I was reading an English translation of Spring Snow by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima while I travelled in Japan. On my return, I made a colour chart by isolating every reference Mishima made to colour. Instead of a romantic story, in black and white printed text, there are coloured rectangles as well as chapter and page numbers in my book. There's an essay and a colour index, in both English and Japanese. It was an important work for me, and I've gone on to make other books.

You sort of hope your work will get better and better, or at least keep moving forward. But it's not like that. Ideas leapfrog each other. It's not linear in the slightest.

Nichol: Thinking about non-linear paths, there are themes, visual forms and classification tools which you've revisited throughout your practice. Can you tell me about your work with botanic gardens and what brings you back to them?

Alison: Botanic gardens are connected to history, art, architecture, philosophy, medicine, all sorts of things. Perhaps they represent a desire to control even what you love and what inspires you.

I visited many botanical gardens across Europe. I liked seeing how they change at different times of year. They're austere plant libraries in the winter, when not much is growing. Then in the profusion of spring and summer, growth and colour take over and put pressure on the underlying geometry. The Beds drawings, made from garden plans, explore that geometry. Using pencils ranging from 9H to 9B, I worked with tones of grey and graphite.

Later in 2015, I did a residency at Cove Park, on the Rosneath Peninsula in western Scotland. It's very near Linn Botanic Gardens, which is a deeply eccentric garden, and very magical, and I fell in love with the notion of the botanic garden all over again. I made a book about it, Another Green World, with the writer Philip Hoare.

Another Green World – Linn Botanic Gardens, Encounters with a Scottish Arcadia

And then in 2022, I made a site-specific work for Inverleith House, the art gallery in the heart of Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden. The garden is famous for its rhododendrons. There's an incredible labour that goes into developing and looking after the collection.

I wanted to make a wall painting because it's ephemeral, like the blooms themselves; it would last for a time, and then be painted out. I catalogued all the different colours of the rhododendrons and made an exploded colour chart. I mixed the colours for Rhododendron Jazz Band onsite, and used random number generator software to position the coloured rectangles on the wall. The botanists and gardeners brought me Vireya rhododendron flowers while I was working.

Nichol: It feels like the work is dancing right on the line of order and chaos.

Alison: That is what it feels like, order spilling over into chaos.

Nichol: Your interest in nature extends beyond gardens. Can you tell me about your work with butterflies?

Alison: Even though I grew up in different places, they were always urban. So my interest in the natural world came later, through museums and science, rather than running around in the countryside with a butterfly net. Sadly, that wasn't my experience.

In 2008, I was working with collections at London's Natural History Museum for Charles Darwin's bicentenary, and I came across the story of the peppered moth.

Unbeknownst to Darwin, it changed very quickly during his lifetime. In the North of England, when industrialisation was at its height, the moth developed a black form to camouflage itself against soot-blackened trees. But elsewhere, it remained white with black speckles. It's a very visual manifestation of Darwin's theoretical work, and I used this idea of black and white and colours moving across each other to make prints and drawings.

Later, I was invited to the Galápagos Islands, which took me back to South America for the first time in decades. There, I worked with an entomologist at the Charles Darwin Research Station. In Quito, I met a Jesuit priest who collected butterflies and moths. I've also been part of a butterfly expedition in the Pacific rainforest in Chocó, Colombia and made a radio programme about it for the BBC.

Psyche Or, the butterfly – an expanded field guide

You might think of the Galápagos as a place of giant tortoises and amazing birds, but there is a community of people who live there. So, even there I found wonderful stationery and gridded papers, which were headed with little eco-aphorisms. I made drawings on them and photographed people going about their daily lives, and created a small series combining the two.

This led to my Galápagos paintings, which I made in Scotland. For projects that involve a lot of research and travel, I usually make the work afterwards in the studio. My work is quite meticulous, and if I'm in the rainforest, I might attempt a few drawings, but I certainly can't paint there.

Nichol: Beyond the natural world on Earth, you've also used found materials relating to astronomy and space. Can you tell me about the Hubble paintings?

Alison: Most of the found materials I've used have been drawings, but the Hubble image... I suppose you could call it a photograph, although it pushes photography to the absolute limits. It's a composite image made by astronomers from 2,000 different images from the Hubble Space Telescope – at the time, it was the deepest image of space in existence.

The image is called eXtreme Deep Field, with its very particular spelling, it's almost like a logo. It is also the title of my series of paintings. So far, there are 33 of them. Working in series can suggest infinite possibilities. I certainly don't have to make them all, just enough to suggest that potentially the series could go on and on. I'm working with a series of shapes derived from the photograph that mask and reveal celestial bodies, galaxies and objects in the image.

Even though they're very different groups of works, the way I make the Hubble paintings is similar to how I made Houses into Flats. I've used linen stretched on board to give me both canvas and a hard surface, which means I can use sandpaper as well as a paintbrush, and draw with rulers and stencils. I make tracings and use the Renaissance technique of pinpricks to transfer the drawing onto the canvas. Then I start painting, I love putting paint onto canvas, mixing it, having a brush in my hand. It's thrilling.

Alison Turnbull’s studio with works from the series eXtreme Deep Field

Nichol: What are you working on at the moment?

Alison: I'm working on a new Hubble painting and a totally new series of completely abstract paintings. It's early days.

Alison Turnbull's drawings exhibited in 'El gesto insistente'

I'm in an exhibition in Bogotá this year. I've only just scratched the surface with Colombia. I'd love to spend some time working there. I want to start a group of works on paper that links the technique of my Beds drawings with recent experiences in Colombia. I sometimes find drawing incredibly difficult, and painting comes more naturally to me.

Nichol Keene, writer

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation

'The Edge of Forever', an exhibition of paintings by Alison Turnbull and drawings by Emma McNally, is on display at Large Glass, London N1 1DN from 13th June to 6th September 2025

Alison's recommended reading

'I think literature, especially fiction, is a brilliant exercise for painters, because when you read, you're constantly making images, they're coming into your head all the time, almost unbidden.' Alison Turnbull

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle by Vladimir Nabokov

Species of Spaces and Other Places by Georges Perec

Mr Palomar by Italo Calvino

The Sight of Death by T. J. Clark

The Optic Nerve by Maria Gainza

In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina