Szilvia Takács

sculptor | 1978, Budapest

My six-piece pyrogranite relief cycle is supplemented by an animation. The reliefs tell the story of a house in a forest. I borrowed a sculptural approach used in Roman antiquity: stories linked together were often depicted on marble reliefs. My pyrogranite sculptures are similar to these and I complemented them with the modern technique of animation. I made a paper relief with five picture-planes for the frames of the film, of which I always replaced one, and I painted them in watercolour. The script is the same as on the reliefs but it is in colour and in motion. The house forlorn in the forest is gradually overgrown with the trees and bushes around it. Man-made things give in to the passing of time and nature reclaims control. This work is inspired by a personal experience of mine. When we were approaching my grandfather’s place along the forest paths and sometimes drove into the forest from the main road along a path we didn’t usually use, my mother would always say that our old house once stood here. But in reality there is nothing there. The forest I could see was the same as everywhere else along the way. Then my mother told me that my grandmother built the house from adobe with her own hands. They were born there and moved to the big house I know only later, when they were older. I tried to imagine that perhaps one of the trees might have once been in their garden, but there is nothing I can hold on to because it is all gone now.