Life scale rusty nail made in bronze appearing to have been hit in the ground at an angle.
Both comic and provocative, Nail is a 2 metre bronze sculpture, treated as the title implies, to appear like a giant rusty nail. Nail is hammered between the ancient and modern. At the intersection of these two worlds, Nail is a nostalgic recollection of tools traditionally used by the construction industry and favoured by Turk’s archetypal white van man, now of less and less necessity in the modern architecture of One New Change. Its rustiness, meanwhile underscores the uselessness of this once useful object, while also suggesting the creep of the natural into the territory of the man-made. Not only a literal object, the nail doubles as a psychological object which suggests “nail in the coffin” and “nailed to the cross.” Rather more humorously, viewed from a certain angle, Nail appears to pin One New Change into the ground, although viewed from other angles, it hints at the empty space where what was nailed has long since been removed. A giant magnification of a miniature object, the closer the viewer stands to Nail, the more comically abstract the object appears, as by contrast, both the viewer and its surroundings appear to shrink.