Bill Woodrow: Pond Life, 2006

Bill Woodrow (1948) is a well-known figure of new English sculpture from the 1980s and has spent the last three decades endlessly renewing his formal vocabulary through collecting and transforming. For Mudam’s opening, he has created Pond Life (2005), an enriching work which occupies a singular place in the artist’s production made up of inverted codes and everyday objects transformed into art. For the first time, the artist has integrated his project into a system of exchange, which gives him the opportunity to thank the visitor in his own way by giving him a coin. This treasure trove allows us to apprehend artistic creation and its transmission by the museum in a new way while acting as a good public relations exercise for Mudam. Woodrow inverts the usual relationships, which are formed within the museum by offering takeaway artworks, thus rewarding the public with “cash” for coming to visit and providing various types of “enrichment”. This all takes place against a background of croaking, copulating frogs attempting to multiply to infinity.