One of the memorable explanations that Elizabeth Turk has heard about how her marble sculptures are created goes something like this: "They were made by an enormous machine."

Just what kind of machine that viewer wasn't able to say. But you understand why someone was grasping to explain her large, uncannily intricate sculptures, a group of which is now on view at the Lux Art Institute in Encinitas.

She calls the series "Collars." Some are in an Elizabethan style, with delicate, billowy curves and others would qualify as ornate breastplates, with allusions to everything from clothing to bones. Each is installed on a pedestal to suggest the presence of a figure that isn't there.

These works take years to complete. The sculpture she is working on at the Lux, where she is doing a public residency through Oct. 3, has been two-and-a-half years in the making. (Turk's show will remain on view though Oct. 31.)

"I'm not really product driven," Turk says. And you have to think this is a form of understatement.

She points to the work-in-progress, where one strand in its network of shapes is smooth and another is rough. Smoothing every inch appears to be more than she can accomplish in a short stay. And asked if she can finish this work in progress while at the Lux, Turk laughs and says "We'll see."

Working with weighty chunks of marble is something we might associate with brawny artists and Turk, with her slender frame, defies that image altogether. But watching the video of her at work, running in the gallery, you see how confidently she proceeds.

Her show is an auspicious way for the Lux to begin its third season of exhibitions rooted in residencies. Her sculptures combine sheer physical beauty with a quality that transcends their material nature. A large-scale drawing, "Vine #7" (2008), reaching from floor to ceiling, reveals the same fusion of intensive labor and spiritually infused imagery.

The physical presence of her sculptures is only part of the picture, as far as Turk is concerned. She describes her approach as "the crafting of thought" and the sculptures on view as "one conceptual work."

Seeing them together, you grasp what she means: each "collar" amplifies the meaning of the next.

"I approach them as a room full of people," Turk says. "And they create an expanded moment more than a narrative."

This is the first exhibition locally for an artist who has shown widely, in Los Angeles, New York and elsewhere.

Turk, a fifth-generation Californian, grew up in Pasadena and studied international relations at Scripps College. She worked in Washington, D.C. in various capacities after graduating in 1983, but by the early 1990s was pursuing a graduate degree at the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute in Baltimore. She completed an M.F.A. in 1994.

Bronze was her preferred medium at the time. But wanting to avoid being compared to a more established artist in a competition, she decided to turn to marble.

This turned out to be her postgraduate education. Through some twists of fate she became acquainted with a man — still a close friend — who had an impressive cache of marble. These were huge remnants left over from the making of the Lincoln Memorial.

These became the stuff of her "Wings" (1995-2000), large in scale and in a style that pulls from neoclassical and romantic precedents. They were recently donated, as a group, to the National Museum of Woman in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Like her later collars (most made between 2003 and 2006), they are emblems of the human figure. And like so many of her works in marble, they begin with blocks of stone that weigh in the neighborhood of 400 pounds.

Turk moved to New York. But after Sept. 11, she felt a need to be closer to her parents and other family members. She started spending part of the year in Newport Beach and found a marble yard in Santa Ana where she could create her work.

She and her husband still divide their time between New York and California, but Turk identifies closely with the West.

And with her art, she takes a long view. "I want to have a body of work in the end that all fits together," she says.

But working with stone makes even this big picture seem small to her.

"I love the history of rocks. It puts human history in perspective. I sometimes think that I may be reshaping something that may be more beautiful unchanged."