Sarah Turner, Lake Baikal (2008)

Medium: Video Painting, Projection, Color and no sound

Dimensions: 4 Scapes | Duration: 57 min.

Collection: Video Painting Solo Series

Edition of 7

Reference: VPSS-STLB08

Lake Baikal is a series of four video studies totaling 57 minutes by British artist and prolific film maker, Sarah Turner which explore the fantastical landscape of the Siberian lake by the same name.

Shot in 2008, and premiered at the Institute of Art and Ideas in January 2009, Lake Baikal builds upon Turner’s experimental film work of the last two decades which has explored therelationship between internal and external realities. The work focuses on the dramatic impact of the lake meeting the air and shores. This boundary between the astoundingly deep interior of the lake and the exterior landscape may be a clear one scientifically yet Turner’s work presents it as anything but. Instead the boundary is lost in the all-consuming blur of steam which covers and coils over the surface of the lake in winter. Similarities between this work and Lawson’s skies are apparent in the way both use an entirely honest method of representation to present natural scenery in an engrossingly alien way. It’s unsurprising therefore, that the astounding beauty of the works often leads the viewer to question the authenticity of the imagery, touching upon our self imposed boundaries to the perception of reality.

Sarah Turner lives and works in London. Turner graduated from St. Martins School of Art in 1989 with a degree in fine art; film, video and photography, and completed her Masters at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Turner has curated a series of programmes of experimental film from around the world for the National Film Theatre, the Tate Gallery and the Arts Council of England. Her films have toured both nationally and internationally. She had a retrospective at Montreal's Image et Nation festival in October ‘97. Turner’s first feature, South by Southwest, was commissioned by the BFI and was subsequently bought and developed by Film Four Lab. Ecology is her latest film project, an experimental film that explores the fractured patterns of family relationships. The film is devised through an adaptation of three internal monologues, staging the encounter of image, sound and language. The use of story and the literary devices within are used as a basis to explore a musical grammar through improvisation.