The Invisible Lesbian

Lesley Turnbull is a Scottish Australian artist, teacher, and academic with a research-based art practice. Her work incorporates photo-based praxis, performance, creative writing, and sculpture to investigate how marginalisation shapes personal narratives and lived experience. Recurring themes of memory, place, and time are central to her practice, with images of fog emerging in photographs taken in Edinburgh, explored as a motif that represents the psychological space of "the closet." Additionally, her confessional past bouts of drunkenness contribute to what she terms “queered perspectives,’ characterised by images that are skewed and obscured through an experimental photographic practice.
The completion of her PhD undertaken in Australia led to a series of new art projects titled "Evoking The Invisible Lesbian Though Creative Practice" (2019-2023) that explore the historical and personal intersections of her shifting identity, particularly the complexities of her journey from being a “teenage tomboy” to an adult lesbian in working-class Edinburgh during the 1980s and 1990s. This new exhibition presents the Invisible Lesbian (2024) as a new installation of selected works from this project, along with a new series of photographs that further develop its themes. This project seeks to enhance the visibility of lesbian and queer lived experiences in contemporary art practice.
Lesley’s work has been exhibited in Australia, Germany, Iceland, China, and the UK.