Sleeping Woods
But where do these driftwoods that haunt our shores come from? What trees in the plains, in the forests, in the mountains? And when they were torn out of their ground and carried by the waters there to the sea, how long did they float? How many miles did they travel before ending up on this Camargue beach? Lying down or standing facing the sea, they now rest like forgotten lookouts, scattered on the shore. Half buried in the sand, reduced to their pure essence of dead wood polished and bleached by the wave and the salt, these dormant woods form for me a fabulous plant and wild ossuary in the process of mineralization. Perhaps they will be the fossilized witnesses of the sixth disappearance of living beings in progress on our planet? In the meantime, they write indecipherable hieroglyphs on the sand. It is this hieratic writing, these haikus of sand and bark, that I wanted to capture by waking up these dormant woods through images.
Bernard Chevalier
www.bernardchevalier.fr
