/ ART PROFILE /
The wilderness within The Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden straddles Stellenbosch's manicured gardens and the rugged mountains beyond the town. It's a destination, a must-visit experience to add to your bucket list. JENNIFER CAMPBELL
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ylan Lewis is widely recognised as one of the world's foremost sculptors of the animal form but has, in recent years, used the human form as a means of exploring our relationship with our inner wilderness. Dylan creates pieces that demonstrate both technical skill and conceptual complexity with an international career that spans two decades. Now, his work can be seen in the Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden in Stellenbosch — a space that provides a fitting and unique context in which Dylan's work can be experienced and understood.
THE PROJECT
The Dylan Lewis Sculpture Garden was not calculated. Rather, it emerged unexpectedly over time — Dylan sculpted a flat canvas of land, with all seven hectares shaped and moulded with an excavator according to his direction over several years. The scale of the project was unprecedented, although the principle of the practice remained much the same as his sculpture process. "I felt like I was walking through a large surface of one of my sculptures," he says of the project. As such, he applied the same techniques as he would for a smaller creation, working within the sightlines of the nearby mountains so that the garden formed part of a much larger composition.
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