Everyone occasionally picks up a chestnut, shell or pebble that you happen to come across, because it has a nice shape, feels good in your hand or has something intriguing that makes you pause for a moment. Martin Belou has made this fascination his work. This simple “shovel shed”, once the repository of spades and other tools, has been transformed into a temple of nature. On the mud table are “trouvailles” and sculptures incorporating found objects or materials of plant, animal and mineral origin. It puts the senses on edge. The monumental table resembles a workbench, an altar or a cosmic workshop. The smell of pine tar and the whole setting give the impression that someone or something is busy fixing things, growing or creating a recipe – as if an invisible force controls this place. Martin Belou: ‘If I believed in God and had to imagine his workshop, it would look exactly like this. My conception of the sacred is strongly linked to nature and our relationship with it. I consider nature and life to be the ultimate sacred.’

The artist’s vocabulary ranges from trivial material – such as rabbit droppings, considered a small sculpture made of grass – to rare things. These sculptures express wonder at nature’s dizzying, inexhaustible wealth of textures and shapes. Funny form affinities can be discovered: the shell lamp also resembles a jellyfish, a mushroom or solar system. Martin Belou sees the world as a large living organism or web in which everything is connected.The sculptures are composed of materials formed over time through processes such as growth, sedimentation, deposition or accumulation. Marble takes millions of years to form and a shell grows in rings with the animal until it grows from a few millimetres to a full-fledged shell in a few years. In this way, the immeasurable concept of time is contained in the sculptures. As the eye glides past the various objects, all these different layers of time slowly penetrate. The title ÉON – an enormously long span of time, an eternity – reinforces that notion. The benches strewn across the Holy Triangle were also created by Martin Belou. They offer the opportunity to slow down and quietly take in this animated earth.