Josie Rae Turnbull

My work across textiles, sculpture, printmaking and lens-based media, is driven by absurd, fabulist ‘case studies’ in which animal protagonists reveal patterns of human exploitation and the cyclical nature of extraction markets. I’m particularly interested in chaotic synchronicities - for example, connections between the harvesting of horseshoe crab blood for use in contemporary biomedical industries and histories of eugenics - that reveal how logics of extraction and subjugation resurface across different eras. 

In my studio practice, throwaway consumer tat is refashioned through bricolage. The life cycles of various industries, and their uncanny fall-outs, are reconstituted through a visual language characterised by artificial colour relationships and camp material glitches. I’m intrigued by a feature common to both aesthetics of microscopic imaging and the concept of the hyperreal - using the 'absolute fake' to better see the 'real' thing.

My research is currently centred on the ‘factual fable’ of the Asian arowana, a critically endangered fish native to Malaysia and Indonesia, now extensively bred in captivity and sold internationally as a living symbol of wealth and status. By casting arowana as actant, the project critiques its transformation into a ‘lively commodity’ within the luxury ornamental fish industry, where its value is constructed through manufactured scarcity and enhanced by cosmetic surgeries. These interventions have led to what theorist Lauren Berlant calls a ‘slow death’, a prolonged, profoundly compromised existence dependent on fluctuating, fickle demand.

Despite a waning global market, a multi-million-pound arowana trade still operates through official and underground networks of breeders, smugglers, wealthy collectors and fish plastic surgeons. My research traces the lineage of extractive industries in Malaysia’s Perak province, the Golden Arowana’s place of origin and an area historically both exploited and enriched by British colonial tin and rubber industries. The work also draws parallels with the star-making machine of Golden Age Hollywood, particularly the fading glamour embodied in ‘Sunset Boulevard’ (1950) and ‘Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?’ (1962). Through layering these references, the project frames the arowana trade as a contemporary narrative of overreach marked by a familiar matrix of frictions; global trade, human vanity, conspicuous consumption and ecological and moral decay.