written e liz a b e t h
in stone
t u r k
“Script is the grace of a line that conveys meaning in a single stroke,” declared my grandmother, Rita Rue Robbins, a first-grade teacher of 35 years. As children, my sister and I would spend hours writing in cursive within the structure of lined notebooks to guide our curves and loops. To me, script has always been mysterious; an elegant code that not only holds secrets of the past, but also, to use my grandmother’s words, “a chance to communicate directly with the future.” Elegant and understated, the beauty of calligraphic scripts has resonated across cultures and time. Deciphering family letters or reading the original draft for books and other documents can change historical interpretations dramatically. Penned passages caught in time reveal the true intentions of their authors. Written in Stone marks the change caused by technological communication — the ubiquitous keyboard and AI — and seeks to question the transformation of everyday handwriting. What happens when the curved lines of a scripted passage no longer hold meaning, or even exist? Or when the generations of tomorrow merely glance at a handwritten letter, fail to understand it, cannot Favorite, Grateful, Forever, 2023 Collaged photograph, with vellum and paperclips 14 x 11 in.
decipher it, and simply move on, losing its nuances to history? To me, this change is a fundamental shift and one with no return. Marble, a memorial stone, is my chosen material to convey this shift. For me, an aimless curved line with its own tenuous link to a greater geological
Passage 11, 2021 – 23 Marble and gold leaf 8 3 ⁄ 4 x 4 3 ⁄ 8 x 3 1 ⁄ 4 in.
story is the ideal metaphor. I sculpt an endless line that leads nowhere, fractured but fortified through repairs, defying the conventional notion of stone as a solid, everlasting monument. Its strength lies in a delicate balance, a fragile marble line realized only because its environment, the mass of stone, has been removed and its context left invisible. Without context, narratives transform. Without direct
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