Sculptor creates a fantastical world

The drive up into the hills north of Enderby is blasted with colour –– Douglas maple, Western larch, Black cottonwood dot the landscape as the road twists and turns.

For Stephan Bircher who calls this area home, it’s a perfect burial landscape for creatures large and small to find their final resting place. He has spent many hours digging through the dirt and lifting up rocks to uncover these delicate remains among other treasures that nature has left behind.

The glassy wings of butterflies, feathers, shriveled leaves, abandoned shells, even road kill, have all entered the realm of Bircher’s mind and eventually into his studio.

A sculptor, lighting designer, theatrical wunderkind, and alchemist when it comes to fusing nature with human-made objects, Bircher could be considered a kind of mad scientist or a post-modern Jim Henson.

Far from being a “Muppet” lab, his studio is a fantastical place where lit up skeletal creatures spin like whirling dervishes and play musical instruments, their intricate parts held together by magnets, springs, cogs and cranks, and run by small motors.

“I like to take the magic out of my surroundings; that’s how my sculptures develop,” said Bircher. “The bones in my work, and whatever else I find out here, come from my youth of always going out into the wilderness. When I was walking around I would always see things a little differently, of what could be made from nature.”

Growing up near Basel, Switzerland, Bircher says he was always tinkering when he wasn’t rebelling.

The son of a surgeon, he says his parents had high hopes for their son, but Bircher preferred drawing cartoons in his sketch book than attending to his academic studies.

“I had an endless struggle in my school days,” he said. “I found what I wanted by myself, sometimes it was negative. I was not always matching what was expected of me. But I was always drawn to creativity.”

On family holidays, Bircher would go to the house of his aunt in the mountains, where he would make fantasy villages out of things he would find.

“They were more abstract, while my brother made functional steamboats,” he said.

After high school, Bircher travelled to India on what was supposed to be a short holiday. He ended up staying two years.

India was everything Bircher’s upbringing wasn’t: crowded, noisy and chaotic.

“I think it’s this experience, out of my family who were open-minded but always tried to make things organized, that shaped me. I loved it.”

After returning home to Switzerland, Bircher would eventually go on to teach at a day school. His subjects were handicrafts and sports. He also helped his students with numerous extracurricular projects such as hand-building a unicycle.