Gold Indian Erupts from Turtle
Tahlequah, Oklahoma
Francis Jansen, who owned a health food restaurant in California, carved a marble sculpture named "Eagle Man" in the early 1990s. She talked her birth country of Holland into giving her money, and in 1998 had Eagle Man cast in bronze, mounted as if erupting out of an unfortunate turtle, and renamed "Transformation Through Forgiveness." She then took her 13-foot-tall, 10,000-pound sculpture on a tour-of-sorts to various Native American locales, gradually working her way east to Cherokee, North Carolina, where Eagle Man landed in 2003. For unknown reasons the tour then stopped, and the sculpture stood in Cherokee for 13 years. It was finally moved again in June 2016, to the campus of Northeastern State University in Tahlequah.
Jansen claims to have had only a few months of carving experience before she sculpted Eagle Man, and refers to herself as a shamanic sculptor. "I create medicine art for the planet," she writes on her website. "My sculptures are attraction points for Light energy to descend into the earth.... The vibration of a space is attuned by their presence."