Coeur de Mon Coeur

In the spring of 2011, I was invited by VCCA/France and the village of Auvillar to make a piece of sculpture for this lovely promontory overlooking the Garonne and the entrance to the village. A few years before that, visiting Cy Twombly, I admired a round wooden Chinese rice bowl he had acquired from the Lexington Flea Market and that obviously was going to become a pedestal for one of his sculptures. Cy made a gift of it to me. In return, the next time I went to visit him, I took him a little maquette. It was very simple, a horizontal circle of wire as a base with two other circles coming up from it, each bent at its apex into a gothic arch. When covered with blue carbon paper, these gothic arches facing each other looked a bit like a bishop’s miter.

Around the same time I was invited to make the outdoor sculpture for VCCA/France, I wrote to Cy and invited him to Auvillar to be part of the celebrations of VCCA’s fortieth anniversary that were to take place in the fall. Then, in July, Cy passed away.

I had not even known he was ill.

So, on the beautiful plateau behind Le Moulin a Nef, VCCA’s facility in Gascony, overlooking the valley of the Garonne, is the little sculpture maquette I’d given Cy realized in full scale. It is called Coeur de Mon Coeur – Heart of my Heart.

The idea of “heart” flows through the piece in many ways. Of course, there is the shape of the mitral valve, the mitre that is the most visible element as you come across the bridge over the Garonne into Auvillar, but there is also the shape of the bench that anchors the wings of the mitre. By breaking and opening the base of the mitre, a heart-shaped bench results.

Auvillar had been the heart of the production of Fäience pottery in the seventeenth century. Hundreds of artisans were employed in the old Port where the sculpture sits. To include the villagers in the creation of the sculpture, I put out a call for broken pieces of tile and pottery. From the hearths of many of the homes in Auvillar, I pieced together those broken tiles and embedded them into the bench as a tribute to the villagers and their tradition. Climbing the hill to spend a few quiet moments looking out over the Garonne valley, one of them might put their hand on a piece of their own crockery.

Auvillar is a stop along the Chemin de St. Jacques. Hundreds of pilgrims pass by this spot every year on the way to Compostela. When we first arrived, the Maison Viellhezcase that now houses VCCA Fellows was being used as the pilgrim gite for the village. A few years later the town created a new gite in the upper village on the bluff overlooking the Garonne. It is considered the most beautiful pilgrim gîte in France and there the Auvillarais proudly and generously welcome wayworn walkers from all over the world.

The sculpture’s placement at the top of the hill beckons to those passing below, pilgrims or villagers or artists, offering, in exchange for a steep climb, a quiet refuge from which to drop into an aesthetic reverie; one brought on not by the object that pulled them there, the steel and brick construction they may or may not even consider art, but by the view across the river and its valley, composed organically over hundreds of years–– the tiny village of Espalais placed with remarkable perfection among the trees, the steeples of Valence d’Agen on the next rise, the poplar trees growing in rows–– all so resonant Cy Twombly himself would have wept with pleasure. That beckoning gesture is my small gift to the beautiful village that has welcomed us and opened its heart to weary pilgrims for hundreds of years.