Lead is known as a harmful material, harmful to health, impenetrable to light and most liquids. It is also malleable, to the point of easily changing its shape. A movable typing letter made of lead is easily transformed into a deadly projectile. In the first version, filled with ink, it endlessly imprints on the paper eternal stories, while transformed in a bullet, it strikes a living being, stopping its time forever. With a sheet of lead, one can build a box, full of darkness–with neither light nor time…

In studying this material, I discovered several fascinating things, such as its absolute resistance to light.

Hence to ‘my’ catacombs, in which a dreary impenetrable blackness reigns. I began to use lead in large quantities, first in sheet form, to make models for a series of sculptures ‘Eternity’ Later I made lead castings by adding bullets for hunting. I cast slabs of the deceased with positive and negative wall imprints from pre-Christian catacombs, with bullets from the present. (photo: Durchdringung blei)

Bullets ‘durchdringen’ (German: pierce) a body of a living being to kill it, creating total darkness to it. Bullet lead can be used to line a coffin. A coffin must contain the absolute absence of light to put the dead in it.

The opposite of darkness is light. For me, the material opposite of lead is glass. It represents light perfectly. In the Middle Ages in France, glass was used by master glassmakers to color and bring inside churches light along with its myriad colors.

Since years I am working with Murano glass (see here). This particular glass enhances the magic of light, playing with it and shattering it into infinite reflections. Light, movement, transparency are all aspects of life for me. I melted glass on the same matrices as lead.