Nicola Turner fills the YSP chapel with wool and horsehair overalls
Nicola Turner brings her most ambitious responsive work to the site to date Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP)where Time’s Scythe, a sprawling installation made from raw wool and horsehairoccupies the historic chapel until September 27, 2026. The work begins on the outside of the building, spills out of the bell tower and enters through an upper window before collapsing over the balcony into the nave, where visitors move among its bulbous, bulbous figures. The earthy smell of the material enhances its sensory presence, while a herd of sheep grazing the surrounding landscape extends the project’s reach beyond the building’s walls.
Nicola Turner, Time’s Scythe, presented in collaboration with Annely Juda Fine Art | all images by Mark Reeves, courtesy of YSP
Material memory and mortality anchor Time’s Scythe
THE British artist she constructs her installation from individual strands of raw wool and horsehair encased in mesh and sewn together into dense, fleshy masses. Turner describes these organic materials as “dead matter” that contains an inherent, latent energy – wool sourced from the local market, horse hair from old tapestries and mattresses that have spent generations in close contact with human bodies. At the edges of each vintage, traditional sheep shears extend towards the altar like claws, linking the work to YSP’s sheep shearing practices at the nearby Shadow Stone Fold maintained by Andy Goldsworthy, and to the area’s wider industrial heritage, including Sheffield toolmaking and West Yorkshire textile production.
The title comes from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12, ‘And nothing ‘Time’s scythe can make a defence,’ anchoring the work in themes of ageing, decay and the cyclical nature of life and death that run throughout Turner’s practice. The dedication of the chapel to St. Bartholomew, patron of trades related to leather and cutting, adds an extra layer of appeal, as does Turner’s theoretical grounding in the writing of Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Jane Bennett, and Donna Haraway, whose concept of the “tense plot of lively thought” piece.
a large installation of raw wool and horse hair
Time’s Scythe occupies the historic YSP Chapel
