“Shortly before the confinement, I developed a series of sculptures in ceramic entitled Trunks. Sculpting trees had become a necessity. Two very beautiful tree trunks from Sarth which were stored in the workshop were the point of departure for this series.
In parallel to this series, for a long time I had been keeping a block of clay wrapped in plastic because I found it had an interesting form that reminded me of a root. At the beginning of the confinement, which I spent in my Parisian workshop, I took this mass of clay and I started to model it in order to bring out this root form, which would become a tree. It seemed the ideal spot to place a couple that was intimately connected to and yet a prisoner of this plant. As I was working on this piece, a small painting by Petrus Christus came to mind : The Virgin of the Dry Tree, housed at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in Madrid. This a posteriori correspondence is habitual in my work I come from the world of painting, and it’s thanks to painting that I began sculpture and ceramics.”