Bio

Originally from Poland, Sylwia Tur moved to the United States, where she continued to study Linguistics at the University of Washington. While working on her PhD and spending countless hours analyzing language, examining acoustic features of speech, and discovering sociolinguistic language variations, she continued to explore art, the creative outlet present in her life since childhood. As her focus started to shift more towards art, she obtained a Postbaccalaureate degree in Ceramics.

 

Tur is drawn to the simplicity and honesty of form. Her interests lie in language, architecture, and design, distilled to their basic components of organization, grid, proportion, and reduction. She works primarily in porcelain, exploring its fluid nature and treasuring its connection to the earth.

 

She recently constructed a sculptural alphabet, systematically mapping letters to physical shapes, where each letter of the 26-letter English alphabet corresponds to a unique three-dimensional object. A composition of letters forming an expression thus becomes a sculpture.

Sealing the connection between art and language, Tur carefully chooses phrases that become titles of her pieces, and in turn each of her sculptural works is composed of the letters in that phrase, signifying personally meaningful thought, idea, or transformative process. In this way, each phrase results in a sculptural representation according to the letters it is composed of. Construction of additional alphabets is currently in progress, continuing with her native language, Polish.

Sylwia’s work has been exhibited nationally, most recently at the Bellevue Arts Museum and Linda Hodges Gallery, as well as Foster/White Gallery, Museum of Northwest Art, Gallery4Culture, North Dakota Museum of Art, Francine Seders Gallery, and Monarch Contemporary Gallery, among others. She is a recipient of the Individual Artist Grant from 4Culture, Artist Trust GAP Grant, and the Regional Exhibition Award from the National Council of Education for the Ceramic Arts (NCECA). Her artwork is in private and public collections around the world.

 

Tur continues to connect and oscillate between the two worlds: science and art, merging them whenever possible, finding inspiration in linguistics and passion in artmaking.