Sculptor staying true to his heart
- Woodwork is Wouter's first love
- He uses local, naturally-felled wood
- His studio is located in an old sawmill
“With time, you develop a certain maturity in your craft, reflecting more and more on the process of going from what you picture in your mind to physical reality.” Wouter van der Vlugt is a Dutch sculptor and furniture designer based in Luxembourg. His passion for wood started in childhood, when he would observe his father – an amateur woodworker – in the family’s large workshop. He went on to study economics, but eventually returned to his first love. “I think you can never listen to your heart enough,” he says. “Once this passion settles in you, you have to follow it.” For the last 20 years he has been developing his sculptures in Koerich, where he is a founding member of the Sixthfloor artist collective.
Discover his work
INTERVIEW
Yes. Sometimes it can be a bit of a problem, but at the same time it is always very dangerous to get too big, too fast. If you have a big workshop, employees, you end up in a kind of production mindset, and you don’t care that much about the essence of work itself.
That is the great advantage of doing the whole process from A to Z. A big part of my job is looking at the things I am doing, taking a million decisions every day. I cannot delegate that to somebody else. I believe the public would notice if I did.
The one thing I pay a lot of attention to is where the wood is coming from. I’m much more of an upcycler than a buyer of wood. The wood I use is mainly local, which had to be chopped down anyway. I don’t use any exotic wood.
One doesn’t go without the other. On a day-to-day basis, this is an artisan’s job, but my mind is that of an artist. Also the movement, how you use your tools and materials, is very important, because it’s a prerequisite to accomplish what the artist’s mind wants.
