Vadis Turner creates abstract textile-driven sculptures and mixed media works that challenge the narratives of feminine archetypes. Growing up in the American South, she considers the generational influence of women navigating cultural conventions.
In her practice, Turner encourages the misbehaviors and transcendence of domestic materials. Engaging the grid as a poetic structure, bedsheets and mineral wool are given a new voice. Many works are informed by female figures from folklore, literature and mythology.
Turner received a BFA and MFA from Boston University. She lives in Nashville and teaches at Vanderbilt University. Upcoming projects include LongHouse Reserve, Zuckerman Museum and Frist Art Museum. @vadisturner
Where were you born and raised? How did it influence your art and your thinking about the world? I was born and currently live in Nashville, TN. Growing up in a conservative Southern landscape, I became aware of how gender roles, rites of passage, values and objects were passed down as generational heirlooms. Unconvinced -incorrectly- that there wasn't much for me here as a professional artist, I headed north after high school. After a good twenty-year run in New York and Boston, I moved back home with my own family. I never would have imagined that my studio would take root and gain traction in the basement of my grandparent's house in Gallatin, TN.
It's an important time, and Tennessee is an important place to be making art. I think a lot about the behavioral expectations for women and what is embedded within domestic spaces. My studio practice encourages the misbehaviors and transcendence of decorative, functional and structural elements from the home into storied grid-based forms. Aiming to redirect the narrative of feminine folklore, I have created megalithic rock formations out of bedsheets, freestanding figurative windows out of curtains and unruly vessels made with mineral wool and brick dust.
Can you recall a defining moment when you recognized art as your chosen path? I didn’t have an aha moment with a particular painting or show or anything. It was a natural fusion of my personal development and the academic struggles I was facing in adolescence. I had to figure out if I was going sink or swim in school.
Rosie Paschall, my high school art teacher, taught me to have confidence in my ideas, take risks and think big. I learned that art was not only a way of seeing, but a way of thinking and understanding the world. Using art as lens, I forged connections with my other classes. Literature, history and even Biology (in which I had an F) all started go click in the studio. It changed everything for me, and I started going to school hours early to paint. (I turned my F in Biology to an A-)
It's easy for artists, especially young artists students, to struggle with content. There can be a tendency to overdress your objectives. Rosie taught me, all her students, that the best ideas are often very simple. The answer is under your nose – you have to be brave enough to look that close and have the confidence to say “this is enough”.
It’s less about saying something uniquely brilliant and more about showing up to do the work. You will likely discover something you didn’t see coming. I think the importance of art is about putting yourself in the way of being moved.
Rosie still teaches. I recently went to her class, for seniors in her community, and I overheard a woman say “Mine’s not any good. I’m not talented.” Rosie didn’t skip a bit in replying “We don’t talk about talent in here, we get it done”.
What does your typical day in the studio look like? Walk us through your studio and your most used materials and tools. My studio is a 40minute drive from Nashville to my studio/grandparents former home in rural Gallatin, TN. The drive is a nice time to transition. Before I get to work, I take a walk along Old Hickory Lake with my mother, my dog (and sometimes my cat too). Morning walks are an important part of my practice.
I have a pink desk that delights me every time I walk in the studio. I review my notes and bad drawings from the day before to see what sticks. I get up and to sweep the floor. I sweep an awful lot…. not sure if its meditative or compulsive or both. I stay until the very last minute everyday, so I start the next day by picking up the pieces of what I left behind. I tend to what’s in process, find an entry point and immerse back into it. I listen to music while I figure it out. The tedious handwork calls for audiobooks. As I approach a deadline or the completion of a piece, I work in complete silence all day which is the best part of the push.
Questions often drive my process. These have fueled different chapters of my practice: How can wax paper become lace? How can quilts be naughty? How can breastmilk be sculptural? How can cement become a fertile vessel? How can a ruffled bedspread become a glowing hissing window? How can bedroom curtains become a free-standing sorceress? I am essentially asking how the materials can be perceived in new ways and engage with the feminine narrative at hand?
There are lots of scissors strewn about the studio… many are long lost in piles of bedsheets. There is a low supply table with two hammers that rest on an old satin pillow. I bought one from Porter Wagner’s estate sale – I got to rummage through his toolboxes! Very Nashville of me I guess.
What concepts are driving your current creative projects? I am working on the second work in an abstract outdoor sculpture series about Venus, by the Roman goddess of love, as a reclining nude. Traditional for Venus, this pose embodies seduction and passivity. Instead of lying in place, she will be transposed to stand upright as an emboldened grid. The prototype is composed of braided bedsheets and ceramic dining plates that are cast in aluminum and painted red. Like weavings gone wild, this series realizes my commitment to transform housewares, embolden the female narrative and feminize the grid.
The series debuted this spring with Venus Rising at LongHouse Reserve, NY. The next Venus, which is in-process, will be presented outside the Frist Art Museum, TN in 2026.
I currently have a two-person exhibition with Raheleh Filsoofi, my colleague at Vanderbilt, on view at the new ZieherSmith gallery in Nashville. This body of work, my most minimal to date, is made with window curtains that have been reformed into expressive and sensuous grids. Draped like intimate garments, and metallic like armor, the works embody the malleability of the female-identifying experience.
What emotions do you aim to evoke when they experience your art? What are you trying to express? Once my work is presented in public, it becomes enlivened by interpretations and ideas from viewers. I wish there was a less cheesy way to say this, but letting it go is part of letting it grow.
I think a lot about control these days…. about how it relates to a creative practice, the female body, to parenting and marriage. I oscillate on this, but overall, I think control is overrated. A creative process, like a life, isn’t about going from A to B. Ideally, you follow a scent and end up at a location that you didn’t know existed…….. like H.5.
I am interested in things I don’t know what to do with… that can’t easily be categorized. I hope that my work has multiple identities and inhabits many categories (painting, sculpture, craft and textile). I hope it stirs or teases something within…. and that people experience contrasts, like austerity and vulnerability, simultaneously.
When I look at art, I remind myself that the most difficult work for me to appreciate is most important one to spend time with. We get so much information from what we don’t like. We spend so much time “liking” things that we don’t really think about anything while we “like” them.
Which artists, past or present, would you like to meet? And why? I would love to sit and talk with (in no particular order): Adolph Gottlieb, Harmony Hammond, Sol Lewitt, Jessica Stockholder and El Anatsui and Leonardo Drew. Their work speaks to different objectives in my practice.
I love the strong contrasts and expressive compositions of Gottlieb’s painting. Harmony Hammond’s wrapped wall reliefs and swollen forms make me swoon. Seeing my first installation by Jessica Stockholder inspired me to explore mixed media and liberate utilitarian materials from their intended use. El Anatsui’s works read as fantastical, political, abstract, painting, textile and sculpture all at once. I would love to talk about the expressive possibilities about the grid with Sol Lewitt. I keep the instructions to one of his murals on my desktop. Leonardo Drew, who also engages the grid, creates wild, powerful and enchanted work. I think a lot about the spirit of his materials when I gather sticks on my morning walks.
What other art forms play a role in your creative practice?
Engaging the grid as a poetic structure, my practice is influenced by Modernists like Sol Lewitt and Donald Judd. Textile crafts like weaving and quilting, traditional forms of women’s work, also have inherent grid structures. From Anni Albers’s weavings to Rosie Lee Tompkins’s patchworks, the works retain a human fingerprint and are associated with the body.
Many of my works draw inspiration from female characters in mythology, literature, and folklore. I often reimagine their stories through a feminist lens. My 2023 exhibition, She Drank Gold, at the University of Alabama featured a series of grid-based wall reliefs free-standing “figures” made from steel, retired curtains, metal leaf and resin. Informed by famous female outcasts, the works came together in a dance circle inspired by Matisse’s The Dance, 1910. This series presented the potential of the grid to become an expressive body.
Cassandra (2023), for example, was a cursed princess from Greek mythology was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo. Later he cursed her so that her truths would never be believed. In my work, she takes on the form of a tangled harp…. that also looks like an electric rose bush.
A great thing about living in my Nashville is…
I moved from New York to Nashville in 2014. It is very different than the Nashville of my youth. Almost everyone I hang out with is a former New Yorker. We all came here for different reasons, but it’s easier and less expensive than New York . There are niches to be filled. You can still move to Nashville with a dream. I live downtown - not far from the bus station. Sometimes I people stepping off the bus wide-eyed with guitars slung on their backs.
Time is slower here and no one brags about how busy they are…. even if they are really busy.
Can you describe a project that challenged you creatively or emotionally—and how you worked through it? Long considered a “boys club”, I am proud to be in the outdoor sculpture conversation with my current series about Venus - a strong female figure who represents love.
It’s a simple idea, but it took me a while to figure it out. For the past twenty-five years, the bedrock of my practice has been to produce transcendent art works by redirecting domestic materials and female narratives to be seen in new ways. I have worked primarily with fabric and resin to make emboldened sculptures which are paradoxically confined to interior spaces. I realized a few years ago that it was vital to get my work, and the feminine narrative that inspires them, out of the “house”.
I problem-solved on how to liberate the forms without comprising the integrity of my material-driven approach. Realizing that bedsheets could be cast in metal was a breakthrough. What was once malleable and used horizontally inside the home, is now an upright metal outdoor work of art.
Tell us about important teachers/mentors/collaborators in your life.
I met Saya Woolfalk when I started working at Publicolor in NYC in 2000. For the past 25 years, we have grown to intimately know each other’s work and lives. We don’t have to contextualize the new/vulnerable ideas when we hop on Zoom for a studio visit. We say hard things (she once told me I wasn’t trying hard enough and I made exhausting creative “back flips” for a show just to prove her wrong). Most importantly, we share the invisible wins and small humiliations that are peppered throughout our careers.
While working at Publicolor, we conjured up a show of our work in an empty staff member’s apartment in Hells Kitchen. I have a polaroid photo of us, looking like teenagers, smoking on the fire escape at the “opening”. The first time I showed at a Miami art fair was with Saya. We presented in a hotel room in South Beach at the Frisbee Art fair in 2007. I installed my sculpture, Bobbie Pin Explosion, of the back of the toilet. Saya’s piece was laid out on the hotel bed. I want to brag on her…… that same work, Nostalgia, is now part of her solo show at the Museum of Arts and Design.
Sustainability in the art world is an important issue. Can you share a memory or reflection about the beauty and wonder of the natural world? Does being in nature inspire your art or your process? I have engaged with storms throughout my abstract mixed media career. I like to think about the darkness, power and beauty of these uncontainable systems and how that relates to the feminine experience. Dare we disturb the universe? In turn, I like to disrupt and agitate systems/grids in my practice.
When I was living in NYC, I made a series of hand-sewn ribbon “paintings” informed by storm systems. My Brooklyn studio didn’t have any windows, so I watched storm videos on YouTube. I struggled to resolve the works. When I moved to Tennessee, I watched storm after storm roll in from Old Hickory Lake as I worked which served that series as well as future content.
In 2022, I created a series of sculptures that fused the windows and vessels. The grid is an important form in art history that is largely associated with male artists. The vessel, a utilitarian container, relates to women’s work and the womb. In Storm Vessel (2022), knotted window curtains become wild strands that are loosely gathered together and tied with a bow. The bow meets unruliness. The window becomes the weather. The vessel is paradoxically porous. The furied grid has its own constellation of copper joints. The properties of metal, especially copper, also speak to the feminine. It is conductive, sonorous, malleable … and has a melting point. When I made Storm Vessel, I liked thinking about tornados, star maps, sorceresses and how entanglements generate more energy than polite forms do.
This is all to say that the storm is a consistent source of content for my practice. Fire too. Flowers also. I can’t separate the landscape, our greater home, from my practice.
AI is changing everything. What’s your perspective on authorship AI-generated art? What is the importance of human art and handmade creative works over industrialized creative practices? Art mirrors the culture that creates it. AI is an important milestone in our evolution that can and should be used as a creative tool.
I work with domestic materials because they are artifacts. Forever human, they carry histories, tensions and embedded narratives that come with physical use. My process manipulates and poeticizes utilitarian housewares into gloriously flawed objects that are unapologetically tethered to the work of the human hand.
I look at my hands. I got a big new scar below my left thumb this year (from reworking a bedsheet vessel about a cloud). Lots of wear and tear to show for my time, impassioned and sometimes ridiculous efforts. I find a lot more content in nonlinear, often entangled, progressions than in formulaic results.
Exploring ideas, art and the creative process connects me to…
My inner voice and the inner voices of others.
