I revisited my design from 2023 created using a 3D scan I captured off a smaller edition of the original sculpture Au Loup!! by Louis-Auguste Hiolin. I debated whether to try to rescan and redesign the sculpture, but decided to trust my past self and commit to the existing design. The new sculpture was modeled using a different approach than I typically implement, including angled slices and displacing the mesh using scanned texture to accentuate the details on the animals in the composition, for example the dog’s fur. The human polygons remain simplified from the scanning process, representing the digital erosion of time. The animal details allude to the beast in human nature, recounting the history of the lost sculpture, and act as a warning not to anthropomorphize technology, otherwise humanity may become domesticated by our devices.

I also realized that when I took the scan of Au Loup!! in 2023, I was using an eight year old scanner and had limited mobility around the sculpture. When scaling the piece up to full scale, the vertices reveal a subtle triangle mesh pattern across the whole sculpture, my previous sculptures were not scaled large enough to notice. These facets represent the density of the 3D model, the fewer triangles, the bigger and more noticeable each becomes, similar to 2D pixels.

The mesh texture reveals the digitization process as an updated classical sculpture technique. My process combines hand finishing and machine texture, acting as a contemporary manifestation of the traditional mise aux points enlargement technique. The Collas machine, used for enlargements in France, was invented by the co-founder of Barbedienne, the foundry that cast the smaller commercial edition of Hiolin’s Au Loup!!. My new sculpture evolves the historic practice of industrial reproduction updated to reflect the age of computation.

Louis Auguste Hiolin was born March 18, 1846, in Aisne, France. He moved to Paris in 1864 to pursue his artistic training, studying at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts. Hiolin’s early career was interrupted by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, during which he was taken prisoner. Upon his release and return to France, he completed his academic training and cultivated his sculptural practice, creating public monuments. The sculpture that my public intervention is based on, titled Au Loup!!, was Hiolin’s claim to fame. The full-scale plaster version of the piece won acclaim at the 1885 Paris Salon exhibition and it was promptly acquired by the city of Paris and cast in bronze. The monument was mounted atop Parc des Buttes-Chaumont in 1888, although critics claimed the piece lost some of its allure when translated into bronze.

During the Second World War, non-ferrous metal sculptures across Paris were seized and melted for war efforts by the Vichy regime in 1942. Thirty-two years after Hiolin’s death in 1910, Au Loup!! was sent to the foundries, one of many casualties from Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. The destroyed sculptures were selected by a committee that walked Parisian parks choosing artistic expression to destroy as part of the mobilization of non-ferrous metals campaign, while leaving only monuments of undeniable national glory, often rulers.

For historical context, Hiolin was working while Impressionism was in full force. In some sense, he was stuck in the traditional ways while modernity passed him by. Monet and Rodin were in Paris at the same time, creating icons of art history. The modernist avant-garde would have considered public monuments like Hiolin’s to be government propaganda. Ironically, the tradition the modernists rejected was sacrificed, while degenerate art endured.

Straddled between academic tradition and the birth of modernism, Hiolin’s original composition was lost to the machine of war. By updating his work through the lenses of digital fabrication, my goal is to create symbiosis between the handmade past and our digitized future.

I recently was in Paris for reasons unrelated to the Au Loup!! project, however I took advantage of my time there by taking precise measurements of the pedestal. I also had the inclination to make a graphite rubbing of the plinth texture and I decided to trust the instinct and made two impressions, stacked and inverted below.

I‘ve been developing my formal proposal in accordance with French regulations. There are three different departments that need to approve the project, and each will scrutinize different elements of the proposal. Since the government goes on holiday over the summer, I’m taking this time to ensure the document is written properly to address every possible concern. I’ve also been making good progress on the engineering and fabrication strategy, more details in the future.

Since I began exploring Belleville in 2014 and subsequently found Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, I have been learning the history of the park and its crevices. Before becoming one of the 19th arrondissement’s most cherished green spaces, a dark industrial history preceded the romantic public space we know today. For hundreds of years, the park was the primary gallows where the kings of France would display the bodies of dissidents to warn the public against misbehavior. After the French Revolution, the site became a hideout for criminals and a dumping ground for horse carcasses and sewage.

The park gets its name from Mont Chauve or bald mountain, as written in Baron Haussmann’s memoirs, for its mineral rich underground and lack of vegetation. The park was initially a quarry for gypsum which was exported to America, giving birth to the now ubiquitous term, Plaster of Paris. This detail of the park’s history is integral to my material choice of a synthetic gypsum resin, a direct reference to the early function of the land.

In 1860, Napoleon III acquired the land for the city of Paris under Haussmann’s massive urban beautification campaign. The land is too soft for architectural development, so the space was designated a park and Adolphe Alphand was chosen to redesign the barren landscape alongside the paysagiste Jean-Pierre Barillet-Deschamps. Alphand’s design embraced the rugged terrain by creating an entirely human-made landscape, following the craggy contours of the ravaged land. The park was opened in parallel to the 1867 Paris World Exhibition, after three years spent shaping the terrain using the novel material, concrete.

The grotto, previously the entrance to the quarry, was formed using dynamite and concrete to create a peak where the Temple de la Sibylle was built by Gabriel Davioud, also the designer of the classic benches and light-posts in Paris. Originally, there was a light-post in the center of the Temple de la Sibylle, potentially a subtle signature by the architect who conceived both.

The suspension bridge in the park was designed by none other than a young Gustave Eiffel, twenty years before his famous tower. Currently, both the Temple de la Sibylle and the suspension bridge are undergoing extensive maintenance because of the unstable gypsum foundation of the park. This is actually one of the biggest engineering concerns for my project, because the weight of the equipment needed to install the sculpture.

All elements of Parc des Buttes-Chaumont are fabricated completely by humans, standing as a testament to industrial technology while imitating sublime nature. The pathways are lined with faux-wood concrete railings and synthetic waterfalls are scattered across the top of the park, leading into a lake at the base. This idea of technology as an extension of nature is central to my sculptural thinking and pertinent to this project. My new sculpture is a digital facsimile of the original, purely hand-sculpted object. Synthetic plaster will be used to emulate real metal, creating a conceptual reference to the park’s tumultuous history of covering up a grim past with material illusions.

I will conclude with this surreal photo from 1908 of a blimp capturing the aerial perspective of the park, with Louis-Auguste Hiolin’s Au Loup!! still installed. To illustrate how far technology progressed in 112 years, below is an image of my conceived sculpture rendered in-situ using 3D data I extracted from Google Earth in 2020. The evolution from blimp surveys to global satellite mapping illustrates a century of progress, mirroring the history of Parc des Buttes-Chaumont, a landscape sculpted by time and technology.

The sculpture will be created using a 3D scan captured from one of the last remaining editions of the original piece, Au Loup!! by Louis Auguste Hiolin. Continuing the history of neoclassical imitation, the new sculpture imagines how our history will be rediscovered and interpreted in a distant future, provoking questions about archeology and authenticity, presenting a future perspective on artifacts from the present.

In the beginning of 2020 I lived in Paris for a residency at Cité des Arts, where I worked to gain permission to create the public sculpture installation. Although the pandemic halted the project I continued my efforts to research and strengthen the concept. A major breakthrough came in 2023 when I tracked down one of the last remaining editions of Louis Auguste Hiolin’s original sculpture Au Loup!! and traveled to rural Michigan to 3D scan it.

The new sculpture will be created using 3D printed molds, proposing the machine as an apprentice. The contemporary interpretation will be produced using a composite polymerized plaster, referencing the history of the park, where Plaster of Paris got its name. The alpha-gypsum mixed with fiberglass and bronze powder will emulate real metal and allow the piece to patina naturally outside, while acknowledging the synthetic nature of contemporary materials.

I intend to document the journey of attaining permissions and making the sculpture on this blog in an effort to demystify the creative process and to push myself out of my comfort zone.

The project is a continuation of my ongoing series Future Fragments.