Artworks2010Oeuvre (Guinea Fowl)
Oeuvre (Guinea Fowl)
Painted fibreglass
Installation info: Work can either be placed on floor as is or alternatively, and preferred, is for the work to be fixed in place by securing a plate with a spigot on the ground and lifting the sculpture on top of this. Spigot hole is on underside of sculpture. Giant sized Guinea Fowl 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’.