Bob Dylan has revealed his largest-ever sculpture to date of a railway freight carriage, which was installed on the grounds of a vineyard in Provence, France.
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The piece, titled “Rail Car” was built from nearly seven metric tons of iron and set on train tracks for exhibit at the Château La Coste in Provence.
The sculpture “represents perception and reality at the same time … all the iron is re-contextualized to represent peace, serenity, and stillness,” said Dylan, 80, of the piece in a statement, adding that the piece also has “enormous energy.”
“It represents the illusions of a journey,” he added, “rather than the contemplation of one.”
Featuring more industrial motifs of wheels, ladders, and tools, “Rail Car” is a continuation of Dylan’s sculptural works of metal, which he first started showing publicly in 2013 when he premiered “Mood Swings,” a set of iron gates, exhibited at the Halcyon Gallery in London. Other Dylan pieces include Portal, an iron archway he created for the MGM’s National Harbor Casino in Maryland in 2016, and another gate piece purchased by the U.S. State Department in 2019 for installation at the embassy in Mozambique.
Trains and railways have been a repetitive theme in Dylan’s music and paintings, and something he referenced in his 2004 memoir “Chronicles: Volume One.”
“I’d seen and heard trains from my earliest childhood days and the sight and sound of them always made me feel secure,” said Dylan. “The big boxcars, the iron ore cars, freight cars, passenger trains, Pullman cars. There was no place you could go in my hometown without at least some part of the day having to stop at intersections and wait for the long trains to pass.”
Railways have something that has surfaced in many of his songs throughout his career, including his New York Sessions track “Train A-Travelin’” in 1962 and 1979 release “Slow Train,” off his 19th album Slow Train Coming. Growing up in Duluth, Minnesota, Dylan was also surrounded by the iron industry. “I’ve been around iron all my life, ever since I was a kid,” said Dylan. “I was born and raised in iron ore country, where you could breathe it and smell it every day.”
Dylan, who recently sold his catalog of music to Sony Music Entertainment for a reported $200 million, has several other projects planned throughout the year, including the release of “The Philosophy of Modern Song,” a collection of essays celebrating songs by Hank Williams, Nina Simone, and Elvis Costello, in November 2022.
Photo by CLEMENT MAHOUDEAU/AFP via Getty Images
