Walnut Chapel

Last August I said: 'Another walnut experiment will follow soon.' It is now December 😅 Again, this started as a small project that got bigger and more complex along the way. I thought it would be fun to build something out of walnut shells. I still had a 'stained glass' window made of shrink film and that's how the idea arose to make a kind of chapel. I'm not religious, but I really like the architecture of religious buildings. Both the bombastic cathedrals and the most subdued altars. For this chapel I opted for a modest design, as if its users had collected the materials, higgledy-piggledy but with care. The statues, decorations and weather vane do not refer to an actual religion, it is a mishmash of symbols from druids, fantasy and Japanese letter sounds. The vegetation on the outside, Tuscan jasmine (with 223 tiny flowers, all handmade without a mold 🤪) ivy and grass, indicates that the chapel is placed in nature, perhaps an open space in the forest. During the day, the light falls through the window and gives colored shadows to the interior. In the dark you can see the candles and the hearts of the statues flickering with candlelight. To finish off the scene, I added (how could I not) a barn owl . That critter is less than a cm tall 😶.

The scene stands on a wooden base and under a glass dome. It has a diameter of 14 cm and a height of 21 cm. The scene is made of walnut shells and Fimo (polymer clay). The stained glass window is made of shrink film. The three statues and two altar candles contain fiber optic wires that are connected to 3 candlelight LEDs. The large hinges on the doors come from www.hobby-en-modelbouw.nl.