Wouter van der Vlugt

“With time, you develop a certain maturity in your craft, reflecting more and more on the process of going from what you picture in your mind to physical reality.” Wouter van der Vlugt is a Dutch sculptor and furniture designer based in Luxembourg. His passion for wood started in childhood, when he would observe his father – an amateur woodworker – in the family’s large workshop. He went on to study economics, but eventually returned to his first love. “I think you can never listen to your heart enough,” he says. “Once this passion settles in you, you have to follow it.” For the last 20 years he has been developing his sculptures in Koerich, where he is a founding member of the Sixthfloor artist collective.

Rather than working with one particular wood, Wouter van der Vlugt pays a lot of attention to where the wood comes from. “I’m much more an upcycler rather than a buyer of wood.” He uses mainly local wood that had to be felled anyway, so he does not work with any exotic woods. As a child, Wouter was fascinated by submarine life and biology and loved those classes at school. This has also had a profound impact on his work and inspiration of forms. He does not consider himself as creating works as the result of direct observations but rather considers it to be a question of subconscious suggestion.

Wouter van der Vlugt's father was a passionate amateur woodworker, and as a result, there was a very big workshop in his home when he was growing up. As a small boy, of six or eight years of age, he started observing his father's work. This is where the passion really started, and it never stopped. Funnily enough, his father would tell Wouter that he had to learn something “decent”, so he sent him to study economics, but in the end, after a couple of years, Wouter returned to woodworking as that had always been the right choice for him. “You can never listen to your heart enough, I think. Once this passion settles into you, you have to follow it.”

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