Mazie Karen Turner: Absolute Colour - Things the Mind Already Knows

As part of Absolute Colour view over 40 works on display from Mazie Karen Turner.

Mazie Karen Turner (b. Sydney 1954, d. Newcastle 2014) was a highly respected artist from the Hunter region. Her practice traversed the mediums of painting, photography, cyanotype, sculpture and printmaking led by her intuition to create form. Above all however, Turner’s practice turned to working with colour as a medium of itself.

During the period of 1992 – 2006 Turner lived in the Lake Macquarie/ Awaba at Wangi Wangi. Her work during this period drew from the surrounding area with its influential ever-changing body of water Awaba, with her works gaining recognition through several art awards and exhibitions across Sydney and Newcastle. This period embodied exploration in the lead up to completing her thesis at Newcastle University titled Through Colour, A Poetic Mapping of Colour Mapping in Painting And Sensory Effect Of Colour (2007).

Turner was motivated to explore the world of colour, which she explained had come from a painting practice ‘without really knowing colour, and the realisation that we are profoundly influenced by colour while apprehending it as, ‘things the mind already knows’. Her thesis contained her attempt to gain a comprehension of colour through the eyes of other artists whose work reflected this similar fascination.

During the Wangi Wangi period, Turner worked directly with materials drawn from the lake such as Coloured Cups. The artist’s alchemy of working with pure pigment to create her own paints extended to her creating colour palettes to evoke different feelings. Her canvases played with black as a base in interchangeable and intuitive ways and were directed by the interactions between colours.

Several of the works in this exhibition relate directly to Turner’s period of living at Wangi Wangi and her experimentation using colour as its own material.

MAC yapang would like to thank the Mazie Turner Estate, Grace Turner, Kai Turner Tipping, Jasper Turner Tipping and Richard Tipping for their contribution to this exhibition.

The exhibition runs until 2 June 2024