Exhibitions2015Golden Delicious

This exhibition at Louisa Guinness Gallery explored Turk’s long-established fascination with the ordinary. Focussing this time on nibbled Rich Tea biscuits (a plain and economic British tradition), and discarded apple cores. The show illuminates the artistic evolution of these transient objects under Turk’s scrutiny; from teatime accoutrement, to artwork.

Turk sees tea and biscuits as an essential part of the clichéd cultural history of Britain as a tea-drinking nation. For Turk, the biscuits form as much a symbolic part of the landscape as Constable, Henry Moore and William Morris.

Nowhere is this more apparent than “Tea Biscuit” in which the biscuit is painted quite literally in tea, the medium used by the great romantic watercolourists to prime their paper before applying paint.

“Ceremonial Biscuit” is a life size solid gold cast of a Rich Tea. By capturing these humble edibles in 18k gold rather than watercolour or bronze, their symbolic importance is matched by their intrinsic value.

The apple - or rather, its exposed core - is likewise a recurring motif in Turk’s work. Realised in 18k gold, “Ten commandments” – with its gold-set garnet apple pip - gives the apple core new life and new meaning cast in a material that echoes its symbolic importance.