Worthy of the finest cabinets of curiosities, The Island of Wood-Bodies gathers a silent people of figures emerging from wood, earth and gathered fragments. Installed within a reliquary like an ancestral land, these fragile presences seem to meditate between memory, forest and metamorphosis.

Halfway between reliquary and vestige, Jephan de Villiers’ work brings forth a silent people: totems, watchers, shadow processions and figures of memory seem to emerge from a forgotten time. Roots, earth, bark and driftwood become fragments of a meditation on origins, reminding us that before words there was the forest, and that at the end of the journey, everything returns to the earth.

An ecological visionary ahead of his time, Jephan de Villiers leads us beyond everyday life toward “an imaginary civilisation that seems to belong to a past when humankind and nature were one.” Each of his sculptures bears poignant witness to the lost harmony between humans and the natural world.

All originate from the gathering of fragments of nature during long daily walks: roots, twigs, wood, bark, horseshoe crab shells, feathers, seed husks, earth and mud… transformed into small “reappeared” beings. Jephan de Villiers likes to say: “I invented nothing, I simply remembered.”

These small creatures with startled eyes, sometimes draped in feathers, becoming angels, inhabit boxes, panels, or processions accompanied by carts. Together they form the People of Arbonia.

Within Jephan de Villiers’ universe we also encounter the " Fragments of Memory " walnut-like forms wrapped in paper covered with the artist’s invented, or rediscovered, writing, bound together and concealing a secret object.

And then there are the Reliquaries, containing various objects, such as these travel adornments imagined for a child king.