Flood of the Seine 1910
Series of sculptures
Wood, metal, tempera, pyrography.
Dimensions excluding wooden and metal support: 14 x 18 x 0.7 cm
In January 1910, the Seine overflowed its banks and invaded Parisian streets in an exceptional flood that lasted a month, reaching a maximum level of 8.62 metres at the Austerlitz bridge.
Sailors from Brittany and Normandy arrived in Paris with their 300 Berthon boats, folding flat-bottomed boats. They provided part of the rescue operation, from transporting the injured to carrying people. Among these sailors were the Terre-Neuvas, who went fishing for cod off the island of Newfoundland, near Canada.
Paris commemorated them in 2010 with an exhibition of six dories on the forecourt of the Hôtel de Ville, organised by the Malouin association Mémoire et Patrimoine des Terre-Neuvas. A dory is a small, shallow-draft boat, used for cod fishing in Newfoundland. By the way, the mayor of Paris at the time, Bertrand Delanoë, had a Terre-Neuvas grandfather.
To pay tribute to this Terre-Neuvian episode in Parisian history, I created a series of small wooden sculptures with dories that save Parisian buildings and characters from a flood. Each boat is named after a district, monument or phenomenon associated with the capital's imagination.
Their simple shapes are inspired by popular wooden toys, and their bases evoke the pulleys on sailing boats. I chose dark wood, like the beams of the old houses in the capital. They have the colour of bitter chocolate.
