Bless You, Bless Me, Bless the Mountain: Shan Turner-Carroll

COMA is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Australian artist Shan Turner-Carroll (b.1987), titled Bless you, Bless me, Bless the mountain, on view from 6 March - 4 April, 2026 at 37 Chapel Street, Marrickville, Sydney, NSW, 2204.

The sun’s light does not discriminate who it illuminates, who it warms, who it burns. Rain that finds the earth, air that finds the lungs, hearts that find each other. A dislocated shoulder slips back into place; a rock, once moved, returns to its hollow.

This exhibition emerges from an ongoing interest in the relationship between prayer and art making. I am drawn to the possibility of framing sculpture not as representation, but as prayer itself, a materialised act of love, urgency, resistance, and surrender. In this sense, the works are not illustrations of belief but embodied gestures: prayers made with the body, through the hands, in real time. To pray is to focus on an intention. It is an SOS to the heavens, an attempt to process suffering, to seek clarity, wisdom, or relief when language collapses. In a contemporary Western neoliberal world, prayer can feel unsettling or out of place, illogical, naive, even trivial. And it can be problematic to romanticise prayer as a substitute for action. Yet in moments of extreme violence, ecological collapse, fascism, political upheaval, and humanitarian crisis, prayer often feels like a last resort, something people turn to when systems fail and hope thins. These works sit within that tension.