It has been a journey. Ours. Yours. We celebrate the moment when we've completed another full circle. The moment itself is full of joy, filled with a sense of accomplishment that in the beginning, we could only imagine over the horizon. It is a moment when, after a year of challenges, we stand atop a mountain and raise our arms in victory, knowing the commitment it took to get us there.
We chose the Garden of Lights, an artwork by the French artist Virginie Enza Garnier to be the protagonist of our last blog post of this year, the piece that will close the circle. We were enchanted by the finesse of this sculpture and the delicacy of the flowers.
“In your head, there's a whole garden, a friend told me. I confirm!”
This is how the artist begins the story about the creation of this astonishing artwork made with polymer clay. She continues the tale by revealing that her wish was to work in relief because this medium allows it.
“I needed space to express myself,” says Virginie. “The size and format of the jewelry is often too limiting for me, it does not always allow me to concentrate on the creative part because there are some constraints of the assembly of the jewelry.”
In order to give a soul and a face to her creation, she decided to include faces in her artwork. “Maybe I was influenced by Daniel Popper, a sculptor whom I admire,” she reveals.
The sculpture was also inspired by Stéphanie Kilgast, an artist well known for her complicated sculptures which Virginie had met a few years ago. She wanted to reconnect herself with those unique moments that she had experienced with polymer modeling enthusiasts and to challenge her taste for meticulousness and color swatches.
It took hours to create all the gradients, then modeling each little plant piece by piece, carefully moving from one shade to the other. “Here is a little madness, a real creative pleasure!” the artist says. “It's all happiness and true meditation.”
Virginie reveals that the outcome is really close to what she had envisioned. She really loved the execution of this larger piece, with less limitations than the small jewelry formats, which really allowed her to express herself.
The sculpture is 10 cm in outside diameter and is composed of 23 shades of colors created for the occasion. They are modeled in metallic Cernit, in order to optimize the play of light and the flexibility of the medium necessary for this delicacy of the forms. The fire and ice faces were created using the hollow beads technique, which offers an extremely light end result and a moderate thickness.
The final artwork is presented in a 3D photo frame, shadow box, 25 x 25cm, in order to respect the relief and take full advantage of its delicacy.
“There is also a bit of my personal history in this creation,” Virginie says, “but if I share with you today my Garden of Lights, I want to keep this small part in my secret garden.”
