Nicola Turner fills YSP chapel with wool and horsehair forms
Nicola Turner brings her most ambitious site-responsive work to date to Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), where Time’s Scythe, a sprawling installation made from raw wool and horsehair, occupies the historic Chapel until September 27th, 2026. The work begins on the exterior of the building, spilling from the bell tower and entering through an upper window before cascading over the balcony into the nave, where visitors move among its sinuous, bulbous forms. The earthy smell of the material amplifies its sensory presence, while a flock of sheep grazing the surrounding landscape extends the work’s reach beyond the walls of the building.
Nicola Turner, Time’s Scythe, presented in collaboration with Annely Juda Fine Art | all images by Mark Reeves, courtesy YSP
material memory and mortality anchor Time’s Scythe
The British artist constructs her installation from individual tendrils of raw wool and horsehair encased in mesh and stitched together into dense, fleshy masses. Turner describes these organic materials as ‘dead matter’ holding an inherent, latent energy – the wool locally sourced, the horsehair drawn from old upholstery and mattresses that have spent generations in close contact with human bodies. At the tips of each tendril, traditional sheep shears extend toward the altar like claws, linking the work to YSP’s own sheep-shearing practices at the nearby Shadow Stone Fold maintained by Andy Goldsworthy, and to the wider industrial heritage of the region, including Sheffield toolmaking and West Yorkshire textile production.
The title is drawn from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 12, ‘And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence’, anchoring the work within themes of aging, decay, and the cyclical nature of life and death that run throughout Turner’s practice. The Chapel’s dedication to Saint Bartholomew, patron saint of professions relating to skin and cutting, adds a further layer of resonance, as does Turner’s theoretical grounding in the writing of Judith Butler, Julia Kristeva, Jane Bennett, and Donna Haraway, whose concept of ‘tentacular thinking’ finds a vivid material form in the reaching, grasping tendrils of the piece.
a sprawling installation made from raw wool and horsehair
Time’s Scythe occupies the historic YSP Chapel
project info:
name: Time’s Scythe
artist: Nicola Turner | @nicolaturner.art
location: Yorkshire Sculpture Park | @yspsculpture, West Bretton, Wakefield, UK
dates: March 28th – September 27th, 2026
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