Date: 2024

Material: Granite

Location: Camlez, Brittany, France

Program: Bathing Pond

Collaborators: Timothée Ryan

Earth and stone are the sole ingredients of this project.

 

This work is an intent, a gesture, an ethos. It is a collaboration between Timothée Ryan and Laura Stargala - together they chose a site within the woods in Camlez, France to build a bathing pond with locally sourced earth and stone. 

 

The new bathing pond is placed in line with a series of historic washing pools, called lavoir in French. These pools within the woods were once used by locals to wash laundry by hand. A stream passes along side the series of llavoir within the valley. The water runs through the pool from a llavoir higher up and trickles past into a larger llavoir further down the sloped topography. A bedrock of granite emerges from the ground next to the ponds.

 

A raised mound, called a talu in French, also follows along side as a footpath. This is a common form of land manipulations within the local area which can also be seen along roads and agricultural fields. A talu is usually composed of stones that were removed from nearby fields to clear for plowing and planting crops. Earth is also mixed in to create a solid mound, which is then overgown in vegetation. Native plants, such as hart’s tongue fern (Asplenium Scolopendrium) and fox glove (Digitalis) grow from the banks near the ponds, while wildlife drinks from the pools.

 

Although a simple gesture, this project embodies many of the qualities that the duo finds meaningful. By building with available materials, the pools remain a hyper-proximal construction, responding to the immediate context and historical remnants of agricultural life.