Settled with his wife Marie in a small remote hamlet not far from Dol-de-Bretagne, in Brittany, the farmer Jean Grard worked hard and never took the time to stop. It was only upon retirement, after acquiring a weather vane shaped like a windmill, that he had the idea of making weather vanes himself. “I was on the farm all my life, I would never have thought of doing this,” he said. This triggering event of a creative process is probably not enough to fully explain the genesis of a body of work that impresses through its strength, its intensity, and the obsession it conveys.
A work in its own right, Jean Grard’s creation is inseparable from its spatial organization: the weather vanes, resembling fairground rides, are carefully arranged in the courtyard, among the flowerbeds tended by Marie. Anchored into the ground, this polymorphous and solid assembly spins when the breeze blows. Its creator has transformed the traditional art of weather vanes into a particularly original form of fairground art.
GRARD jean
