Artist Gail Turpin isn’t an expert on birds, but she loved hearing their song more clearly when walking her dog around Edinburgh as traffic stopped during lockdown. “I started gathering feathers – looking at them as if for the first time, studying their stylised patterns and asymmetry.”
For this series, Nesting, currently on show at the Upright Gallery, Edinburgh, Turpin worked with whatever she had to hand – wood, fabric, paint – to recreate these foraged feathers. A process, she says, that was full of happy accidents from printing and sanding. “I love the way that [Bauhaus textile artist] Anni Albers explains it: ‘Being creative is not so much the desire to do something as listening to that which wants to be done.’”
