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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Hello, I'm Ben Luke and welcome to A Brush With, the podcast from the art newspaper in which I talk to artists about their influences from writers to musicians and of course other artists and the cultural experiences that have shaped their lives and work.
And this episode is A Brush With Cara Turing, whose paintings present fragments of images, patterns and abstraction in compositions that often upend the conventions of her medium while reaffirming its unique descriptive and poetic powers.
With motifs that appear and often reappear in morphing forms and combinations, alluding to specific moments in her life, to film or art history, her paintings are in flux, both in their structure and spatial arrangements and in their meaning. They are propositions that cannot easily be resolved or reduced to simple or convenient narrative.
But that doesn't mean that Cara's paintings are unfocused or bloodless. Rather, they arrest us and pull us deep into their mysteries, rewarding us as we spend more time with them and return to them. Cara was born in Brussels in 1972 and has lived in the UK since the following year.
She grew up in western Scotland, near Holy Lock, on which she would see nuclear submarines surfacing, one of the personal memories that she's carried into her work, as we'll hear. She studied at Nottingham Trent University, graduating in 1995, when she moved to London, where she currently lives, as well as spending some of her time in Argyll in Scotland.
After graduating, she worked in a gallery and effectively gave up painting for several years. She returned to it with First Volcano from 2000, an appropriate title since she's returned to the volcano motif perhaps more than any other over the years. This canvas immediately established characteristics that would remain important to her.
a range of mark and expression from the liquid burst of the volcanic lava to zigzagging pyrotechnics suggesting the explosion to the delicate lines and smudges evoking smoke the saturated thick red paint of the molten magma below ground and the woodcut like description of the volcanic peaks it established the space of a picture as a zone in which ideas and forms could be tested and improvised
Over the following years, she pushed this into ever-evolving new directions. Desert Volcano from 2003 is one of the earliest paintings in which she depicts pyramids that appear to erupt like volcanoes, a motif that's been reimagined frequently in her compositions since.
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Chapter 2: What cultural experiences shaped Caragh Thuring's artistic journey?
She's deliberately pushed this aspect of her work by commissioning cloth to use as her canvas surface. The bespoke cloth features photographs or even digital versions of her paintings woven into the surface, giving the pictures a hinterland before she makes the first mark. The works then become a conversation with her own imagery, a process of amplification or obliteration.
Kara also has a wonderful knack for surprise. Just when you think you're grasping her practice, she throws a delicious curveball. It might be with an absurdist painting of advertising images of human figures reimagined through those bricks.
It might be a childlike image of a face, as in Rose Puchong from 2016, named after a kind of tea such that you wonder if this face that's little more than a smudge was formed from a tea stain. or it might be the way that the work ebbs and flows between reductive and quickly realised gestures and densely honed and finished compositions. But for all the surprise, there's consistency too.
The complexity of the human relationship to nature is ever-present, for instance in the way that those submarines constantly surface from watery depths, and how the bricks testify to the constant human excavation of Earth to build anew. The volcanoes speak to a concern with worlds that are evident and even strident, and those that are hidden or latent.
the unfixed meaning in her own paintings is a metaphor for the elusive or not fully graspable world of signs and symbols that we inhabit.
I spoke to Kara just after she'd opened an exhibition at the Thomas Dane Gallery in London in June 2026 with pieces of characteristically diverse subject matter and imagery, nods to current affairs including global wars as well as familiar symbols from her lexicon of forms and reflections on historical paintings and sculpture.
Absorbed in these pictures, after returning to them for a second look, I was aware how much they seem to change from one viewing to the next, how mutability is central to their power.
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Chapter 3: How does Caragh Thuring's work challenge traditional painting conventions?
Cara has used a lovely term, juddering, to describe this sense of movement, and I began our conversation by asking Cara why is it important to her to keep her paintings in motion?
I think, yes, it probably comes through from the way that I start them because I have a very clear idea eventually of how I want to begin the work. So I feel almost like I'm a projector when I get to the point where I'm in the studio, I'm surrounded by these canvases and I have certain things that I want to include in any particular painting.
So I start with one of these items or ideas or visions in a sense or something that I want to refer to and then it begins and then the next thing comes in and the process of making the work sort of evolves and it goes off piste of course. And sometimes the painting stops. Sometimes it's done quickly in one day. Sometimes it takes two years. Sometimes it takes six months or three weeks.
So there's this constant movement and this clash of imagery as well. And it's about what you can put together to convey something that you're intending to convey.
Can you tell me how structured the kind of, if you like, lexicon of forms or signs that you're using are when you're in that moment? So you say you've got the idea. Do you kind of have like your palette of forms ready and waiting or is it really intuitive and one will emerge from nowhere that you might have used before? I'm interested in how structured it is, the compositional approach. Yeah.
I mean, that's evolved since I began painting again. And I guess I'm at a point now where there are those sort of motifs and motives, actually. And they have come through over a period of time and built up. And of course, the volcano is the first painting that I ever made when I started painting again.
This is in 2000.
Yeah, I mean, I actually didn't really start then, to be honest. I was still running a gallery with my friend at that time. So 2003, exactly June 2003, I left and sort of went into the studio. But anyway, the first painting was a volcano. And that's continued throughout all the work. That imagery has come back and will probably continue forever, I imagine. Yeah.
The brick I started, I can't remember using that, but for me it was the perfect mixture of something that was man-made and human and it came from under the ground and emerged above the ground. So that for me was a very simple, small object that contained a lot of what the whole work is about in a way I realise now at this point.
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Chapter 4: What motifs frequently appear in Caragh Thuring's paintings?
Do you think of that in relation to the making of the painting a great deal?
I certainly did at the beginning when I started working again, but also it was about how to get in people's way, like to take physical space in a way or involve the human body in the painting so that you were looking into a different space. And I see that as both actual, you know, feeling that you're walking into some sort of
like an architecture in a sense, or a room, but also mentally that you find a way to go somewhere else out of the space that you might be inhabiting at that moment or the things that you might be surrounded while still relating to those things. So it's playing with those different sort of lateral spaces in a way, I guess. Yeah.
A lot of what you've said so far makes me think about language. And it seems to me there's a lot of language play in the work. Yeah. I'm thinking particularly of just a very obvious one, is that there's a painting called The Turinger, which is a sausage, right? And so, you know, it's obviously a reference to your name and so on.
And therefore I started thinking about, are some of the images almost kind of avatars for you or a kind of, not self-portraiture, but almost like a self-reference, a kind of means of marking your presence in the work in some way?
Well, I mean, I actually did think of that painting as a sort of cheeky self-portrait in a way without having ever painted one since I was at college. But I went to Berlin when I first moved to London. I was an intern in a gallery called the Agency Gallery that was in the East End at the time. And we were doing the art fair and I stayed with some friends of my parents.
And they said, oh, you know, there's a sausage called a Thuringian. And I was like, oh, really? And we've got one for dinner. So I was like that was a sort of white meat sausage. And I thought, OK, I've never heard of that. And I sort of forgot about it. And then, you know, when I made that painting, I suddenly realized, remembered this sausage and I was researching the sort of visuals around it.
And there's imbuses in the town with little plastic motifs that sit on the top of the hut serving these sausages.
with a sort of a roll and the sausage in it and it looked very sort of phallic and vaginal this this sort of combination of the two things so I painted it as a sort of not as a portrait but a sort of reference to a portrait or something or even sex or the union of two people or something so it sort of carried all these things and none of it at the same time you know and that's what I enjoy that you can
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Chapter 5: How does Caragh Thuring incorporate personal memories into her art?
And often when you come back to the studio, those paintings have some life in them or potential to go further. When you're satisfied at the end of the day and you think, oh, I've
you know achieve something often you're like oh yeah so what you know and I'm not sure whether that's just because but usually it is like that and I find that with looking at work if I'm immediately satisfied that's it it's gone the next day you know or seduced immediately so I've never really wanted to seduce with paint in that sense.
And it seems to me also one of the elements that adds to that is that there's this wonderful palpable sense of drawing going on and thinking through drawing on the painting as opposed to in a sketch before you come to the painting. That seems to me a very deliberate thing. We feel you there teasing out ideas.
Absolutely. So there's no...
preparatory work for any of the paintings and occasionally I make drawings after the paintings but I do think they are like drawings a lot of them and there's definitely drawing in there and there's no need to do preparatory drawings because you know I don't understand where someone works something out and then replicates it in a painting often I mean even if you look through historical paintings
The sketches are usually more exciting than the finished work because they're trying to behave themselves or they've lost some of the sort of impetus or the enthusiasm, the rawness that was there at the beginning. So I've always tried to avoid that as well. So all the mistakes are there. Everything's there and you can't really avoid it. You know, that's what makes the work. That is the work.
Let's move on to the questions that we ask all our guests. Who was the first artist whose work you loved?
When I was 15, I went to Paris and I saw one of those sort of 80s ugly Frank Stella wall sculptures in the Pompidou Centre. And for some reason it resonated. It was very exciting. I didn't necessarily love it, but I just felt this is really exciting. There's something here. You know, this is exciting. And then I think probably Otto Dix.
I was very interested in Otto Dix, actually, when I was younger. Just the portraits. I can't remember the name of the painting, but there's a woman smoking a cigarette with her legs crossed. That's a fantastic painting, yeah. And there's just seems so much in that to me, both horrific and beautiful and naughty and exciting. And, you know, it covered so many things.
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Chapter 6: What role does drawing play in Caragh Thuring's artistic process?
What motivated you, I guess, to make a painting about that subject matter? Because we're looking effectively at a globe that is described through satellites, right?
Totally. And I mean, there's many strands to that in a way growing up in that environment where I saw these nuclear submarines and in a place where the docks were declining and the oil rigs were being built. You're sort of aware of this heavy sort of militarization of an area that's quite sort of innocent. It's, you know, amazing landscape. All the mountains are overgrown.
hollowed out in the Cold War full of ammunition and different things. And it's all invisible in a way. And these satellites, I can't remember what started, but I think I was reading something in the paper. And I was reading about the fact that he's been providing military support for 25 years.
And that's why we need this horrible man, because he's, you know, the MOD and the America, everybody's relying on him in the world, really, with these satellites. And also that they'd asked him to change the lighting on the satellites because they were making scientific experiments.
exploration or experimentation or whatever research difficult because the glow of these lights was overbearing so he had to tone those down so all these different things that i was just thinking this is horrific and then we're sort of cocooned by this without really realizing you know we look at the sky we see all these lovely stars and the odd satellite you see sort of
going overhead and so I wondered if there was any way to look at how many there were so I googled it and found this website that wasn't official that showed them in constant motion live shifting around the planet and you could look at any part of of the world or any country and reorientate yourself on this map and see them just sort of slowly shifting so I just took a few screen grabs and decided to paint it and I thought of it like a
sort of an eyeball in a way or or a moon or a star constellation or or a planet or you know it looks like all of these things and there's sharp lines at the bottom on the top where the poles are where they obviously don't need so many and it is horrific and of course it's not every dot that was on the on the actual screen grab I just made my own version of it in a way and I also was thinking about Via Selman's paintings and the sort of infinite spaces in her work and and how sort of epic they are and so delicate at the same time
And that's right. There is a sort of delicacy in the horror in a way that that brings the sort of gravity of the subject matter home, doesn't it? When you have that sort of delicacy, you can somehow make an impact which is greater than being bombastic.
And there's almost like a dandelion that you could blow off, you know, and of course, they are uncontrollable as well. They spread everywhere. And also the idea of something that's so epic on a small scale. You know, there's another painting with and often I paint, you know, rivets or nuts and bolts or totally banal industrial items that have been carefully engineered and thought about.
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Chapter 7: How does Caragh Thuring view the relationship between art and nature?
They could be, you know, they're lying next to partners or on their own with the sword, which is what is in one of these paintings. It's just that combination that things don't change, you know, it's timeless. You know, we can be looking at 400 years ago and things don't change. They might just be projected in a different way or carried out in a different way.
But humans are basically behaving in the same way, you know, and it's that sort of horror of that, really. And just putting those two things together seems like completely inconceivable, but they're actually much the same thing.
Right, yes, fascinating.
And there's some very funny medieval graffiti on the foot of scratched into the sort of base of one of these things. And there's a great beauty to them as well in the way that the planes are beautiful.
Which historical artist do you turn to the most?
I mean, that's mostly what I look at, I would say, in painting anyway. I used to love Roger van der Weyden, a lot of the Dutch Golden Age painters. And it's always moments of things that I enjoy rather than someone's whole work. But, you know, obviously, you know, I look at Manet, I look at Goya, I look at Frangelico. I love Di Cello. All these people have things at different times.
You know, there's a fickleness to it. There's moments where things are very relevant and then you move on to something else.
I wondered about, yeah, it's sort of relevant or useful, actually. Is it a matter of like going to the National Gallery? There's a wonderful use of an amazing painting by Franz Hals, which is in the National Gallery, Woman with a Fan, where you've done this wonderful focus on the hands which are holding the chain.
Yeah.
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Chapter 8: What is Caragh Thuring's perspective on the purpose of art?
Can you say something about that?
Yeah, when I did that, I didn't admit to anybody that's what I was doing because I thought this is the, you know, it's like going back to college or doing foundation or something. And I'm doing the most obvious thing with the most obvious painting and something that many other artists have done and still do.
and so I made all the work and then admitted what it was finally and you can only add a tiny little thing you know we can't reinvent this canon all we can do is add something and it's the same with music you know as you say it very well you you overlook something that is actually brilliant because you've just seen it to death you know and that's the joy of sort of spending time looking at things you can actually just see them for what they are eventually or listening to music you're
You know, you might be hit by it instantly and then you move on, but you can go back to it because it's just good. And it's such a complex painting that. And I also wanted to do it for the cliche of just doing a transcription and the thing that many other people have done. There's an interesting book, Picasso and his masters.
And you just see how much of his work is just transcriptions of other people's work. And that's what everyone does, you know.
Yeah. You know, I wondered also, when you took that project on, did you also have Picasso in mind? Because, of course, he had worked from the Dejeuner.
No, I didn't. I didn't have anyone in mind. I just knew loads of people have done this, but I didn't have anyone in mind. And I mean, it's like looking at that Uccello painting, the battle in the National Gallery.
San Romano.
Yeah, San Romano. And Guston, half of his...
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