‘Shell Mandalas’: Beauty, provocation spring from Smithsonian specimens

Elizabeth Turk’s “Shell Mandalas” are mysterious, evocative and approach the ethereal.

The series, now at the New Gallery of Modern Art, emerged from her time as a Smithsonian artist research fellow in Washington. She had begun by studying marble (which she has used in other work), hoping to find something in its structure she could “imaginatively convey in sculptural form,” she told the Observer.

Then she came upon the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s vast collection of shells.

Their structures and growth patterns fascinated her. While human skeletons are symmetrical, these calcium-based structures were not – but was there, in this asymmetry, some consistency? Would she find some that fit math’s golden ratio?

Turk used the museum’s equipment and resources, including X-ray technology and digital photography, to examine dozens of shells. X-rays couldn’t penetrate some sufficiently to reveal the structures within. What Turk discovered in others, she said, was “a central, natural architecture – asymmetrical growth patterns that nature defined as the most essential structures.”

In “1 Wendel trap,” for example, the X-ray enables us to peer into a wendel trap shell from the side. We observe a simple spiral radiating outwards from the center. Elliptical loops, small in the middle and larger as the spiral/shell grows, demarcate structural thickenings that are relevant to the shell’s strength. The X-ray enables a front-to-back view that reveals the shell’s intrinsic beauty and vital architecture.

In another piece, “Wendel trap,” Turk changed the orientation, to penetrate the structure top to bottom. A different pattern resulted.

X-rays are not new, Turk acknowledged, but seeing the repeated patterns and varying angles of “the shells we love expands our connection and reshapes our assumed knowledge.”

She also wanted to explore ways to create exciting, beautiful patterns. To do this, she tried laying different X-rays one on top of another. “The chaos didn’t work. It just wasn’t exciting,” she said.

Turk then decided to use a single X-ray, but to radially overlap each multiple times. The result creates optically complex, dazzling and kaleidoscopic-like mandala forms. Look closely and for all of their ostensible precision, there are imperfections to observe. To our eyes, they are spatially dynamic.

Some are so complex as to be exotic or otherworldly. Several represent the spiraling we might observe in pinecones. Others resemble floral seed heads of such blooms as sunflowers. The visual complexity of “32 Cone complex,” for example, resembles a spiraling outwards that is mathematically articulated in the Fibonacci sequence.

“Shell Mandalas” reveals the simple architecture of shells and its power to evoke our curiosity and wonder. Our frenetic lifestyles and inattentiveness to detail tend to allow only a passing glance at such majestic and humbling artifacts. The artist activates our senses with these deep-dive meditations on the complexity of our world and the building blocks of life.

Her hope: That “the subtlety of layering enables these images to grow more in your presence.”

This story was originally published December 16, 2015 at 2:06 PM with the headline "‘Shell Mandalas’: Beauty, provocation spring from Smithsonian specimens."