L’Homme de bois by Fabrice Hyber

Fabrice Hyber is a trained scientist and artist who sees his body of work like a giant rhizome where multiple disciplines dialogue. After beginning with drawing and painting, he now explores all modes of expression. In his work, we see cellular forms, trees with multiple branches, plant-animal hybrids, and far more. This inventor of metamorphoses, who anticipates future mutations, has made green his fetish colour and, since 1995, his ideal forest has been growing in the Vendée Valley of his childhood, where he has sown thousands of trees: “I prefer not to plant trees, but to sow them. This is the least traumatic method for the plant and the earth — and it’s also the most complete learning process. And, so what if it takes a long time? That’s life!”

To renovate the botanical collections of the Armorican Massif — a little-known (but vital) facet of the Jardin des Plantes — Hyber was commissioned to create a totemic work: L’Homme de bois, a 6.09 m/20-foot-tall sculpture. This colossal figure drips with water which gradually results in a natural patina onto which moss and ferns will grow. The seeping moisture and stream jetting out of its mouth provide water for a basin protecting the botanical abundance of a local wetland with rare, protected species such as the Estuary Angelica, the Three-square Bulrush, the Marsileia, and Fritillaria.