Elizabeth Turk, Script, Column #8, Marble, 2018
Artist/Maker:
Elizabeth Turk
Bio:
American, b. 1961
Title:
Script, Column #8
Date:
2018
Medium:
Marble
Dimensions:
Overall (overall): 81 1/4 × 18 × 18 in. (206.4 × 45.7 × 45.7 cm) Overall (sculpture): 45 × 7 1/2 × 6 1/2 in. (114.3 × 19.1 × 16.5 cm) Overall (base): 36 1/4 × 18 1/8 × 18 1/8 in. (92.1 × 46 × 46 cm)
Credit Line:
Gift of The Barnett and Annalee Newman Foundation
Accession Number:
2021-23

Not On View

Script, Column #8 evokes cross-writing, the practice of overlapping horizontal and vertical lines of script, achieved by writing across a page and then turning the paper ninety degrees and writing again. In the nineteenth century when postage was determined based on the number of sheets of paper in a letter, cross-writing was common. For the modern viewer its visual effect flips a mental switch: instead of being perceived as sequential symbols to be read, the words become components of a pattern.
Turk salvaged the marble used to make this sculpture from the renovation of the Getty Villa, a museum of classical art in Malibu, California. Employing a medium long associated with permanence, she pays tribute to the elegant forms of calligraphic script that, in a world increasingly dominated by keyboards, threaten to vanish.

Information may change as a result of ongoing research.

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