Turner Prize Show
In 2011, Scottish artist Martin Boyce won the prestigious Turner Prize for his atmospheric sculptural installation Do Words Have Voices, presented at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. The Turner Prize Show brought together Boyce's distinctive sculptural language, drawing on the visual vocabulary of modernist architecture and design, and transforming the gallery into a hybrid of interior landscape, municipal park, and constructed environment.
At the centre of the installation was a large, modernist-inspired library desk, fabricated from industrial materials including aluminium elements, and surrounded by a series of sculptural components referencing the built environment. The installation also incorporated a canopy of geometric forms and motifs inspired by the 1925 concrete "trees" created by avant-garde sculptors Joël and Jan Martel.
Working with materials such as Jesmonite and aluminium, Boyce created an immersive setting where objects appeared at once functional and fictional, evoking abandoned public spaces and urban memory. His carefully constructed environments layer design history, atmospheric lighting, and poetic abstraction, producing what he calls a "peculiar landscape" for viewers to navigate.
At the centre of the installation was a large, modernist-inspired library desk, fabricated from industrial materials including aluminium elements, and surrounded by a series of sculptural components referencing the built environment. The installation also incorporated a canopy of geometric forms and motifs inspired by the 1925 concrete "trees" created by avant-garde sculptors Joël and Jan Martel.
Working with materials such as Jesmonite and aluminium, Boyce created an immersive setting where objects appeared at once functional and fictional, evoking abandoned public spaces and urban memory. His carefully constructed environments layer design history, atmospheric lighting, and poetic abstraction, producing what he calls a "peculiar landscape" for viewers to navigate.
