British land artist Chris Drury makes installations which, even before being works, are constructions in keeping with ancestral techniques, anchored deep in cultures and imaginations.
He primarily takes an intuitive approach to his work.
Reflecting the places in which they are designed, his pieces come to life through materials found on-site that are in symbiosis with the natural surroundings. Usually erected in magnificent, completely empty settings, his work is expressed in various forms: first, shelters and "covered cairns". These structures mark a time and a place and are sometimes topped with bones like relics – symbols of a sacred spot. Second, the artist also produces finely woven compositions with interlacing leaves, feathers, bones, stones and other matter pocketed at random during his outings. His most striking pieces take the form of spheres, domes or cones.
Drury's transparent, openwork cabins or huts, woven out of material that quickly degrades, stem from this questioning of the border between inside and outside, culture and nature, indoors and out, yin and yang, life and death, space and solid.
In Chaumont-sur-Loire, the artist has designed a mighty spiral apparently magnetically sucking up some of the Goualoup Park's secrets, in a clever dialogue with the big cedars from the time of Princess de Broglie.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Born in Colombo in Sri Lanka in 1948, Chris Drury graduated in Art and Design, Sculpture from Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London in 1970.
Initially figurative in style, his work soon turned more towards nature, where he worked directly. Drury has gained world renown as one of the leading artists of the Land Art movement.
