Number 16 Hanover Square was built in 1720 and has since housed a college of chemistry and a royal dressmaker. Until 7 November the Georgian townhouse takes on another life as a gallery overrun by dark wool and horsehair. Sculptor Nicola Turner is filling its ground-floor rooms and sending a procession of material 12 metres up the façade, and the building’s own past explains why.
In 1845 August Wilhelm von Hofmann opened the Royal College of Chemistry here at the request of Prince Albert. One of his students, William Henry Perkin, set out to make quinine and stumbled on the first synthetic purple dye instead, keeping the find to himself for a while before patenting it. A colour once reserved for the very wealthy soon turned up in fashionable wardrobes everywhere.
Nicola Turner, Line of Beauty, 2026. Mixed Media including wool and horsehair.
Around 1906 the elite couture house Reville & Rossiter moved in. When Edward VII died, demand for mourning dress was so great that the firm dyed its entire fabric stock black, and in 1911 it designed Queen Mary’s coronation robe. Another client was Vita Sackville-West, whose 1913 wedding dress was admired in print for a colour likened to the tassel of Indian corn and a sheen like cocoon silk.
Above: Nicola Turner in her studio. Below: Sculptural forms by Nicola Turner in wood, steel, mannekin, wool, net. Images: Maxwell Attenborough
Turner spent years in set and costume design before taking an MA in Fine Art at Bath Spa University in 2019, and she approaches a building the way a designer approaches a stage. Sackville-West’s marriage to Harold Nicolson, alongside her relationships with women, led Turner towards the shame and secrecy that women have so often been taught to carry. The Latin word pudendum names the female body and also means to be ashamed, and Turner links that inheritance to her own experience of being told to pretend and to play down her ability. The exhibition title, I Tear Secrets from Your Yielding Flesh, comes from Vita’s erotic 1918 poem to her lover Violet Trefusis, which was only discovered in 2013.
Above: Nicola Turner, I Tear Secrets From Your Yielding Flesh, 2026. Mixed Media including horsehair and wool. Below: Nicola Turner, Echo in the Memory, 2026. Wool, steel, lace pin. Images: Annely Juda Fine Art.
The materials carry histories of their own. Turner’s horsehair is retrieved from old mattresses, the beds where people were born and died, and salvaged antique furniture forms the skeleton of many sculptures. Here, dressmakers’ scissors and scientific instruments become anthropomorphic feet and hands, so the figures teeter as if about to move, trailing tendrils that wind through the rooms.
Visitors may read the whole installation as a wedding march or a funeral procession, and the dark wool and horsehair allow for both. It is Annely Juda Fine Art’s first solo show by Turner, following The Meddling Fiend, her 2024 installation that curled around the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds in the Royal Academy courtyard. A catalogue with a foreword by Hettie Judah accompanies the exhibition.
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Further Information:
Nicola Turner, I Tear Secrets From Your Yielding Flesh, is on show until 7th November 2026 at Annely Juda Fine Art, 16 Hanover Square, London, W1S 1HT.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Nicola Turner I Tear Secrets From Your Yielding Flesh, 2026. Mixed Media including horsehair and wool. Image: Courtesy of Annely Juda Fine Art.
All further images as credited in captions.