Lynne Woods Turner and Sidony O'Neal

Lynne Woods Turner and Sidony O'Neal on kinesthetic intelligence, abstraction, and not folding under pressure

Portland-based artists Lynne Woods Turner and Sidony O'Neal both work at the intersection of the interior and the cosmic, finding in everyday materials and gestures a kind of radical potential, as they ceaselessly explore the world around them. On the occasion of Turner's exhibition, one thing and another, at Adams and Ollman, O'Neal posed a series of questions to Turner—about dance, mathematics, and the ways objects hold memory.

_{Lynne Woods Turner,
Untitled #9559, 2025, oil and pencil on linen over panel}
Sidony O’Neal: Can you speak more about your relationship to the dancers in your life? Have other dances influenced your work as deeply as Spanish Dance¹ did?

Lynne Woods Turner: One of my longest and most enduring relationships is with a dancer I met when we were in the seventh grade. Our friendship and mutual support have encouraged my interest in both dance and choreography.

My attraction to Spanish Dance came as a bit of surprise. It was almost as if it chose me, but once I saw the video I couldn’t stop thinking about the immediacy of my response and questioning what was going on. My artistic influences are wide ranging, but mostly from the world of visual art. I have always been interested in how content can be embedded in abstract form. At the time I encountered Trisha Brown’s piece I was thinking a lot about balance and the female body, positive and negative space, movement and the metamorphosis of line. Spanish Dance provided food for thought.

More recently your performance with keyon gaskin in Senga Negudi’s See-See Riders² encouraged me to engage you in conversation. I am still thinking about that piece and the idea of reciprocity represented both physically and metaphorically.

_{Senga Nengudi, See-See Riders (2024), performance for two dancers, choreographed by Senga Nengudi; commissioned by the Cooley Gallery, Reed College. Pictured: performers keyon gaskin and Sidony O'Neal and art historian Leslie King Hammond}
SO: Where does body awareness/kinesthetic intelligence begin in the work for you? Were/are you particularly athletic?

LWT: I will start with the second part of your question because it is easy to answer. I was not athletic at all. In fact, I was so awkward and relentlessly teased that I rarely ventured out of my lane. The idea of competition has always seemed scary. Thinking back, it occurs to me that my life on the sidelines probably encouraged my observational skills and my ability to experience things vicariously. If so, I have no regrets. My physical skills were mostly restricted to my hands.

Your question caused me to look at the original group of drawings I made in response to Spanish Dance. At the time I was thinking about the line of women moving in the same direction, the raised arms, the bent knees, the swaying hips. My visual vocabulary included lines of women in Egyptian wall drawings, the Greek Caryatids, and more. In all of these I liked the changing shapes between the figures and the supportive aspect of women moving forward. I think some of my lines and shapes may come from old “how to draw” books. Looking at this series again, I now see that one or two of the drawings look a bit like one of Mies van der Rohe’s chairs! Chair, dancing, sideline… That subliminal content is just now making sense to me. The layering of image and content operates mysteriously.

_{Lynne Woods Turner,
Untitled #1132, 2014, pencil and colored pencil on paper}

_{Trisha Brown Company Inc.,
Spanish Dance (Line-Up), 1973, performed and filmed 05/07/79 at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; 3 minutes, 46 seconds; digitized analog film, originally recorded onto 3/4" (19mm) U-matic tape; dimensions: 720 x 486. Courtesy Walker Art Center Archives, Minneapolis, MN.}

I wonder if you think kinesthetic intelligence encompasses sympathetic identification through the senses? Listening to music and watching dance provides such a pleasurable sympathetic response that it must count! I am interested in your response to the same question. You are a skilled performer but have told me you have no formal dance training. I wonder how you were drawn to dance, and how it relates to your other work? It seems like most of your work is about the body or is somehow its own body. That is an idea I am very interested in.

SO: Absolutely—it counts for so much! I personally experience sympathetic intelligence as a kind of kinesthetic intelligence. My sympathetic world is actually so intimately tied to my body and its movement that I experience much of my emotional and spiritual world as biological, muscular, physical, and choreographic. It is a complex system that often provides a lot of information about the world, and the work, at once. My work shares this quality, so if it is a body, it has learned for better or worse to be much like my own.

My sympathetic world is actually so intimately tied to my body and its movement that I experience much of my emotional and spiritual world as biological, muscular, physical, and choreographic.
—Sidony O’Neal

^{Sidony O’Neal, bosses, 2024, inkjet, heat sink, gampi, artist mat albizia artist frame}

I have never formally trained in dance, but from a very young age, like seven years old, I have lived my life as a student of martial arts and movement/posture-based practices. Performing movement teaches me a lot about material and line and weight in other aspects of my work as well. My dearest friends are dancers, movers, and choreographers. I revere their sense of space, vector, objecthood, and quality/presence. I am drawn to dance through these relationships—collaborations and invitations that feel tuned to the objects of my own work.

LWT: I love that you use the phrase “at once” to describe the complex information that describes your life and your work. I think one reason that I have always been reluctant to talk about my own work is that I can’t find the linear narrative. Working abstractly provides the possibility of simultaneous perception.

SO: I especially love mathematical objects that don’t fold under pressure, objects that can be transformed endlessly and still some significant kernel remains. For instance, a magic square can be encountered as a puzzle in a magazine, a sacred ornament on the side of a church, or an organizing principle for an entire city. In Justine Chambers’ work The Brutal Joy³, the artist notes that the resultant shape of the electric slide dance is an addition sign. I love that the image of a dance that is often connected to Black abundance and celebration is also inscribing a robust mathematical symbol into the floor, in its wake. A kind of architecture or durable literature that must somehow incorporate itself into the brutalities of daily life in order to keep doing what it’s supposed to do. What has sustained your curiosity about/relationship to mathematics over the years?

_{Lynne Woods Turner, Untitled #1679, 2023, pencil, ink, and gouache on paper}

^{Sidony O’Neal, Program for fireback with sacrificial anode, 2023, Pallet, aluminium, steel, printed inconel, vapor smoothed TPU-70A}
LWT: That is the thing about math. My experience is that it rarely folds. I admire it as a universal language—I see math as a scaffolding of shared understanding.

That is the thing about math. My experience is that it rarely folds.
—Lynne Woods Turner

Math is a consideration in both of our work. You make beautiful sculptures that seem to reference topography even as they simultaneously channel the idea of a body. And you create constructions that repurpose objects already possessing mathematical properties. I am interested in the way you seem to find balance between calculation and intuition.

_{Lynne Woods Turner, Untitled #9571, 2025, oil on panel}

^{Sidony O’Neal, Hash Table 4 Tensors Like Us, 2023, oiled steel and acrylic}

I have always been drawn to maps, diagrams, formulas, directions—anything that shares visual information. There seems in this a generosity that is humane and comforting. I often refer to the paper I draw on as site specific. There are, of course, its physical characteristics: size, material compositions, translucency, color, age, texture, etc. Those things determine much of the way a piece will look. But I also consider mathematical information part of the subliminal language: scale, proportion, the relationship of center to edge, our understanding of direction, the possibilities of pattern and internal compositional relationships, etc. Having a mathematical reference point helps us read an image whether we are aware that we’re doing it or not. We begin to judge the image in relation to our experience.

As to sustained interest? My best answer is that I have never had a dry spell. An awareness of mathematical possibilities means you always have another problem to solve…

SO: I am curious about the status of precision in the work. The image of meditative presence often belies the intensity of sustained activation—of muscles, light, time—required to do something that will be witnessed as requiring exactitude. I feel that precision often requires a kind of energized dynamism or yang energy. Is this true for you?

^{Sidony O’Neal, Lemmmmmma, 2023, Canon G7000, pencil on gampi, albizia artist’s frame}
LWT: Yes. Precision is always a matter of balance: dynamic, reciprocal, serving the work rather than a preconceived notion of production. I hate to use the word “mindfulness”, but it applies. Precision requires concentration, presence, and humility.

Lynne Woods Turner (b. 1951, Dallas, TX; lives and works in Portland, OR) holds a BFA from Stephens College, Columbia, MO, and an MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Drawing Center, New York, NY; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA; and Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO, among other venues. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; the Hammer Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles, CA; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. She is the recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2022), The MacDowell Fellowship (2020), Hallie Ford Fellowship, the Ford Foundation (2016), and the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship (2016), among others.

Sidony O’Neal's recent solo presentations include The Kitchen Video Viewing Room (To make a secret, attention is all you need), NY; Et al. (Softmax Hard Hasp), SF; Lewis Center for the Arts, (The Pudding Butcher), Princeton University; Dracula’s Revenge (NOT TALKING UNTIL BAD COMPANY JOINS), NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (Enchiridion: Aisle, Spline, Resort), Portland, OR; and Veronica (AuguRing), Seattle, WA. Duo and group exhibitions include Southern Guild (DRIFTWORK), LA; The Whitney Artport (INFANT: BANNED SKILLS); Third Born (Continuous Dimensional Thorax), CDMX; ICA at Maine College of Art and Design (ENTER:) and SculptureCenter (In Practice: Total Disbelief), NY. O’Neal is the recipient of awards and fellowships including the Trellis Stepping Stone grant (2026) the Oregon Arts Commission's Joan Shipley Award (2020), a Hodder Fellowship at the Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University (2022-23), and a Hallie Ford Fellowship in Visual Arts (2023).

Bibliography

Adeyemi, Kemi. "Nothing Is Alone," in Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi, ed. Allie Tepper. New York: Pacific and the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, 2025.

Roseberg, Susan. Trisha Brown: Choreography as Visual Art. Wesleyan University Press, 2017.

Tepper, Allie, ed. Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger and Senga Nengudi. New York: Pacific and the Cooley Gallery, Reed College, 2025.

Notes

¹Trisha Brown Company, Spanish Dance, 1973.
²Senga Nengudi, See-See Riders, 2024.
³Justine Chambers, The Brutal Joy, 2025.

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