Sculpture for the Billund city sculpture park. A standing horse is shaking hands with a LEGO man, both cast in bronze, each around 90 cm. They are situated in a construction cast in concrete resembling a house. The LEGO man is part of the sculpture by courtesy of LEGO Group. The sculpture is to be completed in the summer of 2001.
Speech from the inauguration of the sculpture “Welcome to my world”:
This afternoon, as I assembled the sculpture together with the stone cutter, a girl from the school traffic patrol asked who the weird figure was whom the Lego-man shook hands with. “Can you not see that it is a horse”, I said. She thought about it for a while and said: Òbut it does not have a tail”. From m y point of view there is nothing weird about the horse since I have worked with it for many years. I suppose I am less known for the Lego-man.
For quite some time I believed I was the only one working with this type of figure, namely the horse; however, one day, as I visited the Guimet Museum for Asian Art in Paris, he suddenly stood there; a proud, rampant horse with loin cloth and crown, a stone sculpture from Cambodia, 1000 years old, exactly as I would have liked to create him; then you do not feel so special at all.
I got the idea for the little encounter “Welcome to my world” long before Kirsten Vagtholm from the Billund Art Society asked me to make a draft for the Vejle sculpture path. I have often been fascinated by the little LEGO-Technic man and the way it resembles a robot, square and at the same time lively and charming. Also the way the elbow joint is made as made in wood; a feature which I also saw on the baroque wooden figures in Brazil of Christ with his arms along the side of his body; enabling it to lie in a glass coffin at the alter. However the arms were also able to be spread out, so he could spread them out on a cross at the wall. The modelling dolls that former artists used, dressed or draped as models for their paintings, are made just as carefully in the joints as the LEGO-Technic figure, so as to be able to express in posture and movements the same as humans do with their bodies. So when I was asked to make a draft for the Billund sculpture path, I could not imagine making any other figure than the one standing here.
I was interested in who the artist was behind the LEGO figure and was told that at LEGO it was a matter of principle that all products were designed as a teamwork. It somehow fascinates me and reminds me about how in former days one seldom knew the artist behind the stucco because the whole workshop or several masters worked together. In the same way I have realised that I am maybe not such a genius, that the work I make is inspired by other works of art or they may have been made before, just in another context.
Also I do not believe that the LEGO-Technic figure would have existed without the fantastic story about the Italian carpenter who so much wished for a little boy that he made the little wooden doll Pinocchio so delicately that it came alive.
It has been exciting to create this sculpture for Billund sculpture path and I hope that you at Billund also will enjoy it.
Billund, May 18 2001
Pontus Kjerrman
