‘Angry pop artist’ Ben Turnbull presents his ‘personal, melancholic, nihilistic’ collection: ‘I Don’t Like Sundays’

British artist Ben Turnbull was a cradle Catholic, and is now an atheist.

His latest body of work I Don’t Like Sundays is a set of 12 mixed media pieces and wood carvings, made from reclaimed church pews, hymn boards and panels, exploring his personal experience of ‘violence resulting from religious influence’.

From his family heritage and strict Catholic schooling, where he was educated by nuns, to his recollections of witnessing the 2017 London terror attack on Westminster Bridge, Turnbull harnessed both the space of lockdown and the art of sculpture to process a lot of repressed memories.

Ben Turnbull, Sunday Bloody Sunday, from I Don’t Like Sundays – photo: Henry Newman

“Like everyone else who hasn’t undergone extensive therapy,” he admits, “I have buried anything that I found too complicated to deal with, but like everyone else, you only have to scratch the surface for these things to bubble up.

“I see these sculptures not only as a slow release, but as an exorcism, one that has been painful to perform, but which was also astonishingly liberating.”

Blow Up – photo: Henry Newman

From June 6-9, the pieces will be exhibited in the unique setting of The Mount Without, the stunning deconsecrated church now home to Impermanence dance. Arranged around the church so as to blend in with the existing ecclesiastical furniture, the carvings are replete with cultural as well as religious iconography.

The title of the collection echoes Turnbull’s 2009 series I Don’t Like Mondays, which was an artistic response to the 1979 high school massacre in San Diego, California in which a 16 year old girl killed 16 of her fellow students because – as she later explained to police – she didn’t like Mondays (her story was turned into The Boomtown Rats’ most famous song, that same year).

Hymn no.2 – photo: Henry Newman

At that time, Turnbull carved firearms into a series of former school desks; here, he is using the same whittling techniques, but on church pews. Accompanying the carvings, there are mixed media hymn boards – including Hymn No 1, which cites Johnny Rotten’s famous last words to the Winterland ballroom crowd at what turned out to be the Sex Pistols’ final gig: ‘Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

Working on these compositions has given the artist a means of delving into his religious past, as well as his formative years of growing up from adolescence into adulthood, soundtracked by the rave music of the early 1990s. He describes the results as “personal, melancholic, nihilistic”; achieved from a point of being “mentally shut down and left alone”.

Last Days – photo: Henry Newman

Ahead of the exhibition launch, I Don’t Like Sundays will be promoted via a billboard and flyposter campaign across Bristol in conjunction with Jack Arts and UNCLE.

Acknowledging the deliberate choice of making 12 works for the series – bringing to mind the 12 apostles – Turnbull draws a further parallel. “They took the word of God to the wider world,” he reflects, “and in a sense this exhibition is my own spreading of a truth, via posters and flyers – and from a radically different perspective, of course.”

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Ben Turnbull: I Don’t Like Sundays is at The Mount Without on June 6-9, from 10am-6pm. There is a private view for buyers on June 9 at 5-6.30pm, and for guests at 6.30-9pm, followed by drinks in the Crypt until 11.30pm. For more information, go to www.benturnbull.com.

Main photo: Henry Newman – Ben Turnbull: Hymn No, 1

Read more: The exhibition redefining protest

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