Five Sculptures on One Curve (1996-2002), Museum Naturalis, Plesmanweg, Leiden.‘
I processed two hundred tons of steel for that. That’s a lot. You don't learn something like that in a few years at art academy. Certainly you need experience, study, and research.’ Frans de Wit
Like a snapshot in a journey undertaken together, the ‘Five Sculptures on One Curve’ keep watch stoically in a sweeping line near Museum Naturalis in Leiden. They reach up in a vertical line while standing on a sloping verge between motorway and cycle path. From the outside the work looks colossal, but each of the five sculptures consists of two narrow sections that form a pair with space in between. To make them, the artist sifted through a sea of cut and folded ship's steel to find the pieces that were exactly the right size and shape to form a composition with, after which he would weld them together. The artist developed the idea of working with compressed ship steel because of its greater abstractness. It was a structural element that could be processed into a larger whole to create a total skin. His aim was to make ‘things that belong to themselves. Scrap is not something that I made myself – not my choice of shape ... it has its own energy. It was once red hot, a kind of dough.’ Once again, De Wit sets himself a gargantuan task. He works non-stop for six years to process and weld together 200 tons of steel to create ‘Five Sculptures on One Curve’.