Artworks2002Oeuvre (Wild Turkey)

A giant fibreglass egg painted to look like a wild turkey's egg.

Turk has produced several of these large forms, based on the eggs of different bird species. The first of these works was commissioned for the 2001 exhibition ‘DEAD”, organized by the artist-led group Welfare State International. The exhibition explored alternative, celebratory approaches to the taboo of death, and each artist was invited to create non-traditional versions of the cultural trappings that surround death. Turk created ‘Coffin’, later re-titled ‘Oeuvre’. The collective title of the subsequent series of giant birds’ egg sculpture – ‘Oeuvre (Hen)’, ‘Oeuvre (Duck)’ etc – plays on the similarity between the word for the life’s work of an artist, ‘Oeuvre’, and the French word for egg, ‘oeuf’.