Meaning in the Marble with Elizabeth Turk
[Episode 6] Elizabeth Turk’s creativity cannot be confined to the studio. This much was clear as we discussed her passion for her art and being an artist. Although she is well know for her work in marble sculpture, Elizabeth naturally sees creative opportunities all around her. If art is meant to connect people, her sculptures are only one way in which she attempt to foster those connections. Those sculptures force you to see things differently, hard stone formed into what looks to be a pliable form, and breaking out of her studio, her immersive pieces force us to interact with one another differently. And in that process, she hopes, exists the opportunity for us to learn something new about one another. It’s that process of discovery that drives Elizabeth and which she wants to share with her audience through her art.
We were inspired by our conversation with Elizabeth. We hope you feel the same when you listen to her story.
“Find comfort in the uncomfortable because things are always changing and that’s a good thing… and it just makes you stronger.”
Elizabeth Turk
Episode Book Pairing
Each episode the The Gray Matters podcast is paired with a book that complements the episode’s subject matter. For this episode’s pairing, Elizabeth selected the following book and maybe the common theme here is obsession. Whatever the reason, it’s a great story. We hope you enjoy it.
The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century
by Kirk Wallace Johnson
On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London’s Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin’s obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins–some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin’s, Alfred Russel Wallace, who’d risked everything to gather them–and escaped into the darkness.
Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man’s relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and man’s destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.
Get your copy of The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century at Bookshop.org.
About Elizabeth Turk
A native Californian, Elizabeth Turk is an artist, known for marble sculpture and thru ET Projects, community art events. Currently, she splits time between a studio in Santa Ana, CA and NYC. She is a MacArthur Fellow, an Annalee & Barnett Newman Foundation recipient and a Smithsonian Artist Fellow among other awards. Turk received her MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Rinehart School of Sculpture in 1994, her BA from Scripps College, Claremont, CA in 1983. She has been represented by Hirschl & Adler, Modern in NYC since 2000.
Elizabeth’s practice, a more traditional object-making art work, is her meditation. Her marble sculptures search the boundaries of paradox: the contemporary in the traditional, the lightness in weight, the emptiness in mass, the fluidity of the solid, extended time in a moment. Her work defies gravity and make possible that which seems impossible. Inspired by the natural world, she references its myriad of elegant organic structures.
In 2018 she launched ET Projects (a CA non-profit) to develop participatory immersive art experiences. Remarkably, her art projects are drawn from concepts originating in stone gardens. Collaborating with communities, she presents the idea of simultaneous moving vantage points and the perspective of enlightenment being aerial, but accessible. This is realized by volunteers carrying umbrellas (colorful pixels) and filming with drones to create larger than life configurations. Her goal is to open the gateway to creative experiences for larger groups and in the end, inspire communities with the power of imagination to optimistically resolve challenges.
