Turned Wood Now: Redefining the Lathe Turned Object IV
An excerpt from the book "Turned Wood Now: Redefining the Lathe Turned Object IV" published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Arizona State University Art Museum - October 18, 1997 through February 1, 1998 organized by Senior Curator Heather Lineberry and curated by John Perreault, former Senior Curator of American Craft Museum and now Executive Director of Urban Glass.
At A Turning Point
by John Perreault
Turners come from all walks of life. A few have formal training in art or design, many more are basically self-taught or have learned from conference demonstrations and sometimes apprenticeships. But Dennis Elliott, who calls himself a self-taught, has perhaps the most unusual background of all. He was not a stockbroker or a teacher or a salad bowl maker. His earlier career was that of the drummer for the well-known British rock group Foreigner. Elliott's wife lona gave him a Black & Decker lathe attachment for his power drill and that star ted it all. He needed to get his mind off the anxiety of performance. But turning took over.
"In creating music, you're creating out of thin air. There's no material that you're working with when you begin, he told Niche magazine. "When you're working with a solid object like a piece of a tree, you can only do it once. The responsibility is therefore greater than creating a new song which can be wiped out and started again.
Early in his post-Rock life, Elliott and his wife opened a craft gallery in West Hampton, new York. But eventually he gained recognition as a turner in his own right; his use of scale developed; he discovered a vocabulary. Elliott limits himself to large burls that he turns into vessel forms or slices to make the inserts of metal, alabaster or other materials.
The wall sculptures are basically platter forms that are too big to be platters and are lifted on to the vertical plane of the wall where they become dramatic but serene reliefs. They retain the real shape of the tree when cut through on the horizontal. This causes a fine contrast between the circles and the irregular outline of the tree trunk. The wall piece more than the burl bowl is Elliott's signature format. The power of these works is remarkably consistent. They are not quite paintings, but they hold the wall better than most shaped canvases. The circles refer to the annual rings of the tree but have even greater symbolic weight: time, wholeness, and the tradition of the tondo in Western religious art. Since the artist also carves radiating lines out from the centrifugal forms, the pieces suggest the sun, the moon, and even the halos of Byzantine icons and other Christian art. When the burl bowls are shown in conjunction with the wall pieces, as in this exhibition, the bowls gain in mystery, for they seem to be wall pieces that have turned in on themselves.
 Updated November 10, 2009 |
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