by Laura Read

Homestead Magazine

Turn the corner three blocks from Sebastopol, California’s main street, and enter Florence Avenue, a place where residents and visitors love to stroll — not to see any flowering landscapes, but for an exhibit of giant recycled art sculptures that colonize the lawns. Some of the towering works — the ambulance drivers, truck drivers, firemen, and farmers — represent the kinds of people who make American towns do what they do. Others are creatures of fiction borrowed from fairytales and comics —the White Rabbit, a mermaid, Batman, the Three Little Pigs. Together these characters have transformed the once sleepy neighborhood into a parade of America’s quirks and charms.

The French-Canadian-turned-Sebastopol-residents Patrick Amiot and his wife, Brigitte Laurent are the artworks creators. The two have lived on Florence Avenue for almost 20 years. The situation on their block today is quite different from what they found when they arrived from Montreal in 1997, when, Amiot’s wry sense of humor, and the complicated ceramic artworks he made at the time, set him apart from his neighbors. Then, he felt like a stranger. But after a world tragedy collided with his fondness for creative risk, he became the neighborhood’s main theme.

“This is a really important part of my life,” he says as he sips coffee on the shady front porch of his 1905 Queen Anne. “I owe a lot to these neighbors for their support.” Two ladies on the sidewalk gawk at a giant Godzilla that is frozen in mid-destruction in his front yard. In one hand the lizard crushes a windmill plucked from a country farm. In another, he hoists a car and its driver into the air. The terrified driver’s hair stands straight up on end.

Amiot and Laurent’s relationship with Florence Avenue began in May, 2001 when, at a low point in his ceramics career, Amiot made a decision to shift gears. He scrounged up an old row boat and a used wheel barrow, put the parts together, and made a junk art statue of a fisherman in a boat. Friends and neighbors loved it, and that encouraged him to try again. For his second work he went big, choosing one of his adopted country’s favorite icons: The Statue of Liberty. He never imagined his originality and timing would clash so significantly.

“I’m Canadian and the Statue of Liberty represents America for me,” Amiot recalls solemnly. “I put it up on September 10, 2001, and it was just another day. But the next day was September 11. The World Trade Centers collapsed, and there was a lot of emotion and confusion.” As the public reeled in shock, his two daughters worried the unconventional Liberty might get misinterpreted among the waves of 9/11 grief.

“I completely agreed with them that it was awkward,” he says. “I told them, ‘Tomorrow I’ll take it down.’ But the next day I woke up and there were a bunch of flowers and letters at the statue. I didn’t know what to do. Should I take it down or leave it there? So I wrote on it ‘In memory of all the innocent people who died September 11.’”

With his intentions clearly stated, his Lady became a shrine for the lost loved ones of 9/11. “That was the beginning of my relationship with my street and the neighbors,” Amiot says. “We started talking, and then I wasn’t such a stranger.”

Awhile later, he constructed a giant fireman for a 9/11 fund-raising auction. Not a soul bid on the piece, but after the event a neighbor asked if he could display it in his yard. “So I had a big fireman across the street with a big heart that glowed,” Amiot says. “The next thing I knew, there were 10 of them in the neighborhood, and it became an attraction.”

One commission begat another, and now more than 200 of Amiot’s characters are providing vibrant notes all over Sebastopol and its vicinity. Sebastopol is in Sonoma County, about an hour’s drive north of San Francisco. People travel the area to shop and taste the artisanal products and wines made from the abundant local fruit. They also come to see Amiot’s works, which are scattered through nearby towns such as Graton and Occidental, and stand at the edge of farmlands and businesses outside of Sebastopol. A free sculpture tour web app is available for download at patrickamiot.com.

Florence Avenue is rarely without admirers pausing to get an eyeful of the grand personalities. Sometimes a customer buys one and takes it away. When Amiot replaces it, the street’s narrative changes.

The house where Amiot and Laurent live is Queen Anne on the outside, but on the inside is an explosion of vitality. His junk art characters crowd up against artworks made by friends and the heartfelt assemblages he’s to mark his wedding anniversaries. Some of the sculptures originate in the backyard, but most are built a bicycle ride across town on a piece of property squashed between the Gravenstein Highway and a pasture smelling of sunbaked wheat.

Every morning contains endless possibilities. When Amiot arrives, he enters a junkyard wonderland. There are piles everywhere: bedframes, jerry cans, and sinks; toy cars, rusty trumpets, and signs. There are collections of clock faces, heaps of engine blocks, and forests of ironing boards; there are mazes of tractor grills, mufflers, and random steel pipes. It is a kingdom of metal, an empire of instruments, a Valhalla of half-made beings, the rust-veined, metal-faced equivalents of brainstorms.

Crammed in one corner are sections of an animated carousel commissioned by a Canadian developer for the city of Markham in Ontario, Canada. It’s the biggest project Amiot and Laurent have ever had, and they’re almost finished.  There are no precious horses in this solar powered carousel. When it’s installed, kids will ride on fantastic figures that are all things Canada, from a moose to a Canadian Mountie, to a leather hiking boot.

Today’s project is an eight-foot-tall dog. As morning sunlight steams the chill out of the dry September fields behind the fence, Amiot uses a welding torch to fire a line of pinprick holes into the side of a 50-gallon drum. The holes make it possible to flex the metal into a bow that serves as the dog’s head. Amiot frees an rusted steel jerry can from a pile (“I have a nose pile and a finger pile”) and attaches it to the face. “I’m into big noses,” he says. “The face turns on the nose.” Grinning behind him is a gee-whiz worker in yellow. The only character Amiot didn’t make in the yard is a toy goblin perched on a shelf; he’s the watchman.

At 10 a.m. it’s time coffee time. The break room is an enclosed high-ceilinged workshop, bright with light, where Laurent is in splattered overalls painting a six-foot metal farmer who’s pushing a wheelbarrow. While Amiot assembles the metal bones of his pieces, Laurent paints the details that bring them to life. The piece is commissioned by the tea company Traditional Medicinals to honor one of its workers. Propped up at the figure’s base is a photo of the man being recognized, a helpful reminder of details of his face and clothes. Laurent swabs a brush into her paint pot and dabs a swath of mustard-yellow onto the green base, making a filigree of sunlit grass. Nearby, three metal farmer-pigs push their own wheelbarrows across lawns painted on vintage metal boxes. “I have wheelbarrows on my mind,” Amiot says, shaking his head.

As espresso circulates, Amiot rounds the conversation back to Florence Avenue, a place that is more personal to him than many neighborhoods are to their occupants. He says he would never have come this far if it hadn’t been for the neighbors there. “I owe a lot to these people. We live in an age where people fight over six inches of fence or the color of a door, and here we’re able to have 25 neighbors agree that having art in your yard is cool.”

He takes another sip of the steaming black drink. “It’s the opposite of a gated community. It lets people in.”