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They're puzzling. Four boulders: each on its own circular, stone slab in the grass. Uncanny, because the sculpture makes passers-by guess at the meaning. It seems that the sculptor is playing with the location: neighbourhood park Bokkefort. He has transformed four naturally formed stones into abstract shapes. Yet the abstraction is relative, because the boulders in the shape of an almond or a stone seem to refer to nature. Exactly so with the neighbourhood park. It is a form of nature cultivated by human intervention.
The 1982 work of art is by Arno van der Mark, at the time a sculptor, later a cultural urban planner with his own office. He trained at the Academy of Visual Arts in Arnhem. At the start of his studies in 1969, the lecturers at the academy were still warm advocates of the integration of visual arts and architecture: integration on the basis of equality, that is.
It is something that has always occupied Van der Mark as a sculptor: the relationship between work of art and location, be it an architectural, natural or museum environment. He is strongly aware of the influence a space can have on the meaning of a work of art, and vice versa. This sometimes forced him to clearly demarcate his works of art. He did this, for example, by placing screens or canvases around it. In this way he made the sculptures inviolable. In other situations he blurred boundaries by working with grids. An example of this is his series of Venuses enveloped in gauze at Amsterdam's Boven-IJ hospital.
In his work of art in Bokkefort, Van der Mark gives free rein to the dialogue between work of art and space. The artwork reflects the location and vice versa.