The mud man
Modelage, Les tempéraments par Ania Sialelli
« Dans l’imagination de chacun de nous existe l’image matérielle d’une pâte idéale, une parfaite synthèse de résistance et de souplesse, un merveilleux équilibre des forces qui acceptent et des forces qui refusent […] Tout rêveur de la pâte connaît cette pâte parfaite aussi évidente à la main que le solide parfait l’est aux yeux du géomètre. »
(Gaston Bachelard, “La terre et les rêveries de la volonté” - 1948)
Made of bumps, hollows, patience and agitation, water, earth, strength and calm, the sculptures of the modeling workshop of Foyer Michaël come to life every day in the palms of students and lovers of metamorphosis. This course is led by artist and stonemason Jean Bacourt. The latter prepares, transforms and sublimates the Bourbonnaise soil like a miraculous bread dough.
In this warm workshop where the smells of coffee and burnt wood mingle, you need to be armed with courage and confidence to “let your hands do their thing”. Thus brown and ocher earths are revealed, sometimes abstract, sometimes figurative, faces, minerals, animals, angles and spheres.
Working with clay requires introspection, but above all warm hands and a bold heart. The different themes proposed (the seasons, the sacred and the profane, the ages of life, the skeleton, the animal form, the vices and the virtues, etc.) are of inexhaustible richness because each modeling is in the image of its Creator. Revealing the deep and poetic individuality of each person, that is the value of the artistic teaching of Foyer Michaël.
Texts and photos: Aude Carleton
