Artworks2015Birth of the Egg Ball

Gavin Turk is famous for exhibiting a blue commemorative plaque at his degree show at the Royal College of Art which read ‘Royal Borough of Kensington, Gavin Turk, Sculptor, Worked Here 1989-1991’ and promptly being refused his degree.
 
William Webb Ellis is famous for inventing Rugby football whilst a pupil at Rugby School. He is commemorated with a marble plaque at the school that reads ‘with a fine disregard for the rules of football, as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran with it thus originating the distinctive feature of the rugby game A.D. 1823’. 

Gavin Turk has extensively used ‘the egg’ in his works for him it serves as a kind of signature or logo. The egg is a symbol of death and rebirth, a psychoanalytic form, it triggers the riddle ‘which came first the chicken or the egg’, as well as a reference to legend and folklore the egg form occurs in the history of art and also egg tempera that was the original painters medium.

Whilst walking on Hampstead Heath Turk came across a deflated rugby ball, which had started becoming an egg shape and with the spirit of picking the new ball up and running with it he imagined the invention of a new sport…

The artwork, a monument to the new sport, is cast in bronze and patinated to look like the augmented version of the original leather ‘eggball’.  Installed at Rugby School, on the School playing field where the game of rugby was invented.  It measures approximately 1.83m in height, 1.53m in diameter, and weighs 700 kg.