Marc Nucera, Jardin de sculptures / Sculpture garden

all pictures courtesy of Sophie Lepetit,
see documentation

In Noves, a commune with around 6,000 inhabitants (2022) in the southern French department of Bouches-du-Rhône, there is a garden with a collection of wooden sculptures, as shown in the images in this post.

Life and works

This art environment has been created by Marc Nucera, who was born in 1966 in Châteaurenard, some 5 km west of Noves. 

His father was a furniture maker. and so young Marc got to know different types of wood at an early age.

When he started working as a farm laborer after school, he collected large round disks of wood from tree trunks, which he managed to saw out himself and kept at home, without really knowing why.

Trees continued to fascinate him, and in 1990, at age 24, he began a project in which he manipulated trees, specifically the height of their branches, to ensure that their further growth would be as harmonious as possible. 

Marc Nucera did this with due consideration for the surroundings of the trees and their continued natural development.

This was an approach that particularly appealed to owners of large gardens, and after an initial assignment his way of working spread. 

He became kind of a landscape architect.and got more assignments for this type of maintenance work, which was probably also a pleasant source of income for him.

A next step in his approach to trees occurred when he began to focus on what could be done in terms of working with tree trunks.

Initially, Nucera used the wood from these trunks to make wooden chairs and tables, an activity he was able to pursue because he had moved into a house in Noves, where he could easily set up a studio.

From this rather simple woodworking method, he soon moved on to creating wooden sculptures, primarily of human figures, as the surrounding images show.

By then, he had gained so much experience in working with the chainsaw that he could undertake this more complex approach with a high degree of artistry.

Marc Nucera used trunks of different types of trees, such as olive, oak, almond, lime, cypress, but also cedar, which can have a surprising scent.

Working with chainsaws in the manner Mark Nucera did, takes strength and perseverance, and he displayed this, coupled with a loving approach to who or what he was portraying.

Working with tree fragments in his studio or in the garden near his home was also of great significance to Nucera. 

As he explains on his website, this allowed him to free himself from the forces inherent in the trees' locations. Working in or near his studio, he experienced the freedom to choose a design that wasn't tied to a specific location.

What you can do with a chainsaw turned out to be a large range of possibilities.

As the images in this post show, the variety of characters that Marc Nucera manages to extract from the cylindrical trunk of a tree is great.

Doucmentation

*  Website of Marc Nucera

*  Article (Septemberv 2016) on the website of Sophie Lepetit, with a serie op photos and a biography

*  Article (October 2016) on Facebook with a series of mages by Sophie Lepetit

*  Article on the website Retour de Voyage

*  Article (2020) on the weblog of Fabien Ribéry

A French book about Marc Nucera

"Les sculptures de Marc Nucera", text by Elisabeth Couturier and Françoise Bertaux, foreword by Chantal Colleu-Dumond, published by Actes Sud, 2020, 160 pages

Video

* Video (Vimeo, 26"08') by Emmanuelle Satti

* Another video (2024) by Villa Datris, publshed on Facebook, with comments by Marc Nucera, subtitled in Enlish, 

Marc Nucera

Garden with sculptures

Noves, dept Bouches-du-Rhône, region Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. France

can be visited on appointmen