William Turnbull's "Figure 1" appears as an erratic stele with an inverted centre of gravity, shaped almost like a pendulum, yet completely static and obviously designed for frontal view. The indecipherable marks also speak for this, appearing partly geometric and partly like letters. Precisely this character of an unknown object with a hieroglyphic designation enables Turnbull to evoke a suspicion of meaning in the viewer.
The work seems to be part of an unknown archaic culture or an unexplainable rite. The chosen form and the marks have a clear hint function, but without allowing any legibility.
In his works, however, Turnbull is not only concerned with texture and surface, but also with questions of balance, perspective and principles of representation. Turnbull incorporates his fascination for the artistic achievements of antiquity, early times and non-Western cultures, from which he draws an amalgam of new pictorial language, which at the same time contains something pictorial, picturesque in the frontality of the three-dimensional figure.
