Usually a ten day trek. We took the fast route via helicopter.
Our Holiness
Approaching the first of Andy Goldsworthy’s art installation in Provence, France there is excitement palatable in the helicopter. Jerry points out our destination: a long wooded escarpment with a tiny stone chapel on the edge overlooking a vast valley of yellow and green. Where will we land? I wonder and look at my parents whose raised eyebrows and wide eyes are indication that they are pondering the same internal question. Our Moroccan pilot, who has never been here before, eyes Jerry suspiciously and edges the bird close to the only somewhat flat spot on the small hillside. There are power lines lurking just a few feet from the blades of the copter and the dirt all around is swirling violently.
This is exciting.
With grace and expertise and only a little pouty lip protruding in and out to defy his cool, calm presence, our pilot gently lower the mass of metal onto the ground as if delivering a newborn baby back to the crib. To my surprise, Jerry asks that He and I have a few moments alone before my parents join us inside the chapel. I am nervous for some reason, what is there to see inside of this old structure? Why do we go alone??
We walk down the hill hand and hand and I feel excitement growing inside of me as we approach this old sheepherders chapel called Chapelle Sainte-Madeleine. The view in front of us is vast with continuous mountain ranges filled with trees and flowers radiantly glowing in this distinctively clear and crisp autumn day. There is a sharp quality to the landscape, like the difference between a grainy three megapixel image and one that is ten or twelve. This is the highest quality, blindingly bright beauty in every direction. I look back to see my parents and the pilot 100 yards up the hill and I turn to walk inside the small chapel.
Silence.
There is the perfectly square door framed with stones of so many ages and colors and then at the back of the chapel is an oval shape made from carved rocks. There is a cavity behind the oval opening that is also oval, three-dimensional. It takes me a moment to understand the depth of this, why this form affects me. It is birth, I decide, after marinating on the space it for several days. A womb. A sacred space made more so by each visitor that passes through and steps inside to feel the power of a continuous line. Round. And rocks.
“I wanted to make a work that would draw people into the space, into ourselves,” Goldworthy wrote about the chapel which is one of nine installments in the Refuges d’Art. “I decided to make a chamber for people to step into. I see the landscape as being not just nature but also people… The presence of people is what I’m interested in. The chamber will become stronger and richer the more it is visited. Each time someone steps inside a little bit of their prscence will be left inside the space. It is like collecting the memory of all the people who will make the walk (or helicopter ride in our case☺).”
Goldsworthy designed this sculpture, along with about nine others in the Reserve Geologique de Haute Provence near Digne Les Bains, France. It is meant as somewhat of a pilgrimage of ten days or so as each installment is about a days walk from the last. This day we took three hours and one helicopter and saw three sites. While we missed the connection of our feet on the earth, the pilgrimage, we were able to get a birds eye view of these incredible mountain ranges. It was a valuable perspective and a really exciting experience to fly (and land) at all of these remote sights.
Inside the chapel, I solemnly entered into the cavity, a space formed by a group of people believing in the importance of their work. Great care is evident. It was Goldsworthy’s intent to have the sculpture occupied by those who walked by. He has no signs around it, and if someone were to find it by accident he wrote, “they wouldn’t know when it was built or why.”
I entered this oval/oval with my feet feeling the earth below and a connection to time passed. I stood there like an effigy, a saint, a symbol, void of the peculiarities of me, simply a form within a form.
There was a feeling of holiness inside of that wall inside of that chapel on the hillside in France. Not my holiness, or Jerry’s or my mom or dad, but of OUR holiness. The sanctity of humanity. All of us. The beauty of form, of shape - the world in side of stone: Simple.
Inside the weight of the wall I felt time, geologic time, not ticking, but existing. And me, my molecules part of it. Just the same as I am part of the landscape outside, energy moving, melding. Me and the trees. Me and the stone of ages. Me and the helicopter, the parents, the lover, the fly I swat, the flower I smell.
It didn’t matter that on that day I was 32 years old, American of Italian decent, a woman, a sister, a child… It was that I was a human being becoming part of where it is I came from: the stone, the dust, the earth.
Stepping out I felt as if I left a legacy of energy that is unique to me and to that time and space and place. But, more importantly and simply, the energy of life as it weaves a story through time. No beginning and no end.
An oval
a circle
A cycle.
Simply a whisper…
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