Dry stone, roots and tower
For this new assignment in the Netherlands, commissioned by Petro Art, my work consisted in sculpting the scenery for Toverland Park’s new attraction, entitled Avalon. I spent a month in the Dutch winter, creating several hundred square meters of low dry-stone wall, randomly covered with dilapidated plaster. In this setting imagined as an extension of the world of Merlin the Enchanter by the park’s designers, walls had to be clad and mysterious false doors created on the buildings under construction. To this was added a thirty-metre-high tower with a giant root running through it.
It’s always astonishing to see the various work areas bare, devoid of the artifices that will cover them. Before the concrete is sculpted, there’s always the work of preparing the supports, building the reinforcement and protecting the unworked areas. A great deal of preparatory work guarantees an optimum finish.
At the same time, my role consisted of supervising a team of designers and accompanying another sculptor who would take over when I left. We began by sculpting the tower, laid out in several sections on the ground, before moving on to the various facades of the attraction.
It was meticulous work at first, to give relief and the impression of age to the various stones, but also very repetitive. The effort and attention was much appreciated by our customers, who were delighted to see us at work in the snow and rain of March.
Not long ago, I was interviewed at the Gare de Nantes by a local journalist. The journalist asked me how to best describe my contribution to the concrete tree sculpture; as an artist or an artisan? Normally, this type of question would have left me speechless, had I not thankfully prepared a very polite, very vague answer:
“we are a bit of both”