Artworks2006The End of the Roll

A bronze cast of the middle of a toilet roll painted to look real.

Turk’s trompe l’oeil sculptures of toilet rolls mischievously imply a symbiotic association between art and shit. Indeed, works such as In Memory of Piero Manzoni see Turk make a playful reference to Manzoni’s Merda D’Artista in which he presented cans of shit as art. Concerned with challenging meaning through re-cycling, re-appropriation and re-contextualisation, Turk’s bog rolls might also be seen to taken on a new life as a child’s telescope – itself an object used to change the viewer’s perspective. They also bear an uncanny similarity to rollers used by painters and decorators to apply paint and wallpaper, transforming the artist into a humble tradesman in the process. Or perhaps not, since these bog rolls are made not from cardboard but bronze, elevating the status of the banal to something far more grand.