Tchou Audebert lives on the edge of the Vierzon forest. A narrow road leads there. In a ray of winter sunlight, giant wooden mushrooms emerge from frost-frozen ferns and tufts of grass. It's a sign, the sculptor's lair is not far away.
There, at the foot of centuries-old trees, the 62-year-old artist is in his element. Carving into the thickness of the trunks, making shapes emerge from them, that’s his thing. Under a lean-to, shavings and piles of sawdust. This is where he works. His side is not ordinary: he works with a chainsaw!
Roosters, bears, owls, wild boar…
Tchou has been carving wood for over thirty years now. “It was music that brought me to sculpture,” he confides over a cup of coffee, in the warmth, while outside, it’s pinching. The man, in fact, is also a percussionist – an art which led him to travel to Africa in the 1980s, and to go on tour with the Cirque du Gabon in 2002. “I started with making instruments, djembes, congas. By working with wood, I wanted to make sculptures. Since then, it has never let me go! » He still keeps one of his very first creations at home, a character about thirty centimeters high. A percussionist, of course.
-The artist first used the wood chisel and the gouge. Self-taught. Then, without completely abandoning manual tools, he moved on to the more robust, motorized chain. There, too, he learned on the job. “I started doing it to go faster,” he smiles. The technique? “It came by itself. I had worked with scissors, so that gives you a basis. And I did mechanics, at school, that brings the notion of machines…”
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