P E T S
Art Animals
A STUDIO MENAGERIE PROVIDES THERAPY
By Bob Keefer
E
ugene sculptor Jud Turner often
surrounds himself at work with animals
— shiny metallic critters made of
recycled car parts and other industrial
detritus. He’s known around town, for
example, as the creator of the 16-foot-
tall great blue heron that stands guard
over the intersection of 13th Avenue and Alder Street
near the west entrance to the University of Oregon. He
once made a life-sized Columbia mammoth skeleton out
of old farm equipment for the Moses Lake Museum and
Art Center in Washington.
He’s at work these days welding chromed bicycle and
other parts into a not-quite-life-sized mustang — the
horse, not the car — for Southern Methodist University
in Texas.
But Turner has also long been the keeper of real-life
animals at the Oblivion Factory, as he has named his
studio, which is housed in a generic industrial tract in
west Eugene.
“Piggert!” he calls soon after I arrive for a visit.
“Boris!”
The current menagerie, which includes two pigs,
four rabbits and three cats, offers various kinds of
attention to a visitor. The cats, all feral, watch warily
from under a parked car. The rabbits are in their hutch
and seem oblivious. Piggert and Boris, the pigs, crowd
in on Turner when he pulls out a bag of carrots, and they
take carrot bits from my hands, too, happily leaving all
my fingers intact. It’s a bit like feeding sausages to an
enthusiastic dog.
“Too many studio hours can make a person buggy,”
Turner says, when I ask how he and his partner, Renee
Mahni, acquired so many animals. “When I got Piggert six
years ago, I started bringing him out here with me all the
time, just ’cause he was portable. My studio is an industrial
warehouse, but it has a yard space attached to it that’s
fenced. And so it was easy to have him hang out in the yard
while I did work, and he seemed quite content out here.”
Piggert, by the way, is not exactly a lap pet, though he
is affectionate; he weighs about 160 pounds.
Photo by Bob Keefer
“It’s a high maintenance pet,” Turner says. “You
wouldn’t want to leave one at home for eight hours while
you were at your office job. I’m part of a pig Facebook
group, and people who do that come home and find that
the pig has dug a hole in the wall just out of boredom
and destructiveness. So I’m with these two pigs almost
all the time.”
That may seem surprising, given Turner’s degree
of artistic success. After graduating from the UO in
drawing and painting, Turner began making small
dioramas out of plastic toy parts. Soon his dark vision
let him ride the steampunk wave to representation with
a gallery in London, which in turn has shown his work in
such places as Art Miami and the Houston Fine Art Fair.
It wasn’t until last November that Turner finally visited
London and attended one of his own openings at the
Woolff Gallery.
His animal population has grown along with the
popularity of his art. Take the new piglet, Boris.
“I needed to get Piggert a friend because they’re social
animals, but I don’t speak pig. So I got him Boris, and for
the first two weeks they hated each other,” he says.
“Well, Piggert hated Boris. He wanted to kill him,
but that was just because pigs have a social hierarchy
and they had to figure out who was alpha. The breeder
had said keep them separated by a fence until they
get sort of used to each other, and now they’re totally,
totally bonded. They sleep together. They get anxious if
they’re not together.”
Plenty of drama potential remains, though, at the
Oblivion Factory.
“The two female rabbits want to kill each other,”
Turner says. “So they can’t actually be in the same space
without violence. Yeah. Wow. We have to double fence
them when they’re in the yard together to keep them
from fighting through one fence. So that didn’t work out.”
So does keeping all these animals around help his art
in any way?
Turner thinks about that for a moment. “It can be
calming when I’m having difficulties in the studio,” he
says. “For example, about four months ago, I had a quite
fragile assemblage sculpture that I had just finished,
and I turned and knocked it off of the table onto the
floor. It broke. I mean, it was, you know, three weeks of
continual work suddenly got broken on the floor in front
of me and nobody’s fault but my own, and I was ready to
burn the studio down.”
Instead of setting fires in his frustration, Turner
went outside and picked up a rabbit and talked to Boris
and Piggert about his troubles.
“And it literally, I think, lowered my blood pressure
and anxiety and frustration.” ■
Meet the menagerie — and buy art — when sculptors Jud Turner and
Renee Mahni, along with illustrator M De Vena, printmaker Rebecca
Johns, and Matt Dye and Molly mae Culligan of Blunt Graffix, hold an
open studio sale at the Oblivion Factory, 3923 Cross Street, from 10 am
to 6 pm Aug. 3 and 4.
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