Ottawa - Canadian Association for Conservation

Accepting the Unexpected:
A Mosaic Project at Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, Chandigarh, India
Marie-Catherine Cyr
Paintings Conservator, Quebec
The Rock Garden was the subject of a presentation at the 35 th Annual CAC Conference in
Vancouver, where this extraordinary sculpture garden was introduced and a call to volunteers was
made to aid in its preservation. 1 This unique Northern Indian man-made gem is the vision and life’s
work of one man, Nek Chand, a road inspector who in 1958 started giving a second life to waste
material from roadwork in Chandigarh, the joint capital of Punjab and Haryana, a city designed by
French architect Le Corbusier. Originally a completely clandestine and illegal operation taking over
government land, it was saved from destruction in 1973 and opened to visitors in 1976. Today, the
Garden spans over twenty five acres of deep rock gorges and mosaic courtyards filled with sculpted
creatures of all sorts, and welcomes five thousand visitors daily.
This paper is a follow-up to the 2009 talk, recounting the experience of a Canadian volunteer
conservator expecting to treat damaged ceramic sculptures, but who ended up doing anything but
that, while still learning much more than anticipated. In addition to being the sole foreigner on site, to
needing to work with various workers who were neither craftspeople nor English-speaking, and being
the only young white female amidst older local men in a society where women very rarely assume
an authoritative role in the workplace, I was asked by the Garden’s Creator and Director, Mr. Nek
Chand, not to be a conservator but to instead create a large mosaic mural.
“You will finish my wall” he said.
“Pardon me sir, finish your wall? Do you have any design or plans I could look at?”
“You will provide them. Create what your heart desires. You start in the morning.”
This talk is in essence a personal account of a unique situation where the unexpected was accepted,
and of the learnings that issued from it. After introducing Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, the mural
project will be presented and the concept of preservation versus conservation in this formidable world
of its own will be discussed.
1 Tony Rajer and John Maizels. “Visionary Art Environments and their Preservation: A Case Study of Nek
Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India.” 35 th Annual CAC Conference, Vancouver , May 27 to June 2, 2009.