Cathy Turner is a British artist and researcher, specialising in dramaturgy, site-specific performance and walking art.^[1] She is a founder member of Wrights & Sites,^[2] and a Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of Exeter.^[3] Turner's practice and research explore how one's life experience can influence one's perception of their environment.

Dramaturgy

Turner's dramaturgical research focuses on the relationship between performance and place,^[4] an area she has explored and documented in her book Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment.^[5]

Wrights & Sites

Turner is a founding member of Wrights & Sites, a group of artist-researchers who develop site-specific artistic works. They are best known for their walking misguides, and their use of the Letterist/Situationist practice of dérive.^[6]

Walking Women

In 2009 Turner collaborated with Deirdre Heddon on a series of interviews with women walking artists. In their two essays, 'Walking Women: Shifting the Tales and Scales of Mobility' and 'Walking Women: interviews with artists on the move', Heddon and Turner argue that a fraternal lineage dominates walking, with the practices of female walkers erased or marginalised. Their work introduces the voices of contemporary female artists that walk into the historical record.^[7][8]

Heddon and Turner's work has sparked a series of practice-based interventions that focus on women who walk. These include 'Er Outdoors' a series of radio programs curated by Jo Norcup that make 'audible the voices of women past and present';^[9] and WALKING WOMEN, a series of exhibitions, talks and events curated by Amy Sharrocks and Clare Qualmann that actively 're-write the canon' and 'imagine a future in which gender bias and skewed vision is destroyed'.^[10]

Selected works

Performance

• Ambulant Architectures (2012), Sideways Festival, Belgium^[11]
• Everything you need to build a town is here (2010), Wonders of Weston, UK ^[12]
• Mis-Guided: Elsewhere in Fribourg (2008), Belluard Bollwerk International Festival, Switzerland ^[13]
• Mis-Guide: Stadtverführungen in Wien (2007), Tanzquartier Wien and Wienerfestwochen, Austria^[14]
• Possible Forests (2007), Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World, Devon, UK ^[13]
• Blue Boy Walks (2004), Spacex Gallery, ‘Homeland’ Exhibition, Exeter and Winchester, UK^[15]
• And On The Thousandth Night… (2002), Kunsten Festival Des Arts, Belgium^[16]
• The Quay Thing, (1999), Exeter, UK^[17]

Dramaturgy

• Nora and I (2009), Funded by Arts Council England.
• Writing Space, (2008), Funded by The Arts and Humanities Research Council.^[18]
• An Infinite Line: (2007), contributed to Dramaturgical Labs for 2008 Brighton Festival^[19]

Selected publications

Cathy Turner (2015). Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Built Environment. Palgrave.

Cathy Turner and Synne Behrndt (2007).Dramaturgy and Performance. Palgrave Macmillan.

Cathy Turner, Tony Weaver, Stephen Hodge, Simon Persighetti and Phil Smith (2006). A Mis-Guide to Anywhere. Wrights & Sites.