Name This Sculpture!

Sculpture made of recycled materials by William Turville

Sculptor, architect and environmentalist William Turville is well known in Concord for vibrant, whimsical creations crafted from recycled materials at the recycling center's annual DropOff SwapOff. When Covid-19 canceled this spring's event, our friends at Millbrook Tarry -- home to Concord Market and Trail's End Cafe -- invited Turville to "do his thing" there....and WOW!

However, this piece doesn't have a name yet--and that's where you come in!

If you can, swing by Millbrook Tarry to see it up close (next to Walgreen's, by Fantastisk Nails & Spa), or if not, see the images and video below. Then, help Bill find a title for the sculpture by submitting your suggested name here before Saturday, October 31! (Bonus points if you can also find Bill's unique "Chair" and "Eiffel Tower" hidden on the same property!)

The winning name and runners-up will receive prizes from The Umbrella Arts & Environment program and Concord Market!

NAME THIS THING NOW!

Name That Thing! Temporary Sculpture by William Turville from The Umbrella on Vimeo.

A WORD FROM BILL

Artist Statement

I enjoy the freedom of spontaneous composition, or, in jazz music, improvisation, an emotional approach to music and visual art. I often have jazz floating around in my head or as a musical background. As an environmentalist, I am also concerned about the things we discard and what that means … and then what can be done with those things. 

About twenty years ago, the then-Emerson Umbrella's Musketaquid Program, REUSIT and the Recycling Program at the Concord DPW decided to demonstrate the latter issue, "the things we discard", by inviting me to use my improvisational sculpture-making to both inform and entertain the residents of Concord as they took advantage of the DPW's semi-annual Spring and Fall Swap-Off/Drop-Off activities.  Along with the intermittent participation of community members who participated in the art-making, I began using simple construction techniques and modest/quick adaptations of accumulated found "things"/raw materials from the S-O/D-O waste stream to build large-scale versions of the similar but much smaller sculptural objects I had been making.  The day's task was simply to grab a pile of miscellaneous representative objects from the waste stream and assemble them, improvisationally, on the DPW front lawn…one day, one large sculpture showing scores of objects and parts of objects discarded that day.  I really enjoy this work and working method.

I try to make a form or forms that are composed from all viewing angles and that also, if looked at "flat" from any angle, retain an interesting and dynamic graphic compositional idea.