Choose a comfortable seat. Clear your head of everyday trivia. Open your mind to life, the universe and everything and come with me on a textual trip to Victor's Way just outside Roundwood, Co Wicklow. On first impressions, this is a sculpture trail of gigantic black granite Indian-motif pieces dotted around a green field site and through a young forest of oak, lime, alder and birch saplings overlooking Djouce Mountain. On further inspection and after almost two hours of chatting to Victor Langheld, the park's creator, I realise this is the beginnings of a philosophical exploration of human capacity (and willingness) for creative change.
Take, for example, the first large-scale piece you encounter on your path through Victor's Way. Called Ganesh, Remover of Obstacles, Downloading BASIC, this is a large human-like figure with an elephant's head (over six feet in height, weighing about three tons) reading a book on the BASIC computer language. Revered throughout Asia as a patron of learning, the arts and power, Ganesh is given the role of gatekeeper to Victor's Way, serving to guide and protect all Internet users. Other pieces currently in situ include the hauntingly emaciated Reductionist Fallacy or Fasting Buddha, the sleek Shiva, the jolly elephant drummer Tabla Ganesh and the five-metre-high finger (with the words "Create or Die" printed on its nail) called The Ultimate Decree.
A former Buddist monk who has spent long periods of time in India, Victor Langheld was born in Dresden, Germany and grew up in Bray, Co Wicklow, having arrived in Ireland at the age of six as a refugee from the second World War. Describing himself at once as a "blue-eyed seeker of truth" and again as a "human systems engineer", he is certainly an enigma to many of the locals in and around Roundwood, Co Wicklow.
His masterplan is to create a contemplative space where people can "go into the forest to confront their adult activity". He plans to include seven large, Irish-designed granite sculptures depicting Birth, Violation, Trauma, Reductionist Fallacy, Enlightenment, Creation and Redundancy (death). A group of seven dancers and drummers (including the aforementioned Tabla Ganesh) will act as a playful introduction to this trail of deeper thought and reflection. "Today, our society includes a huge number of individuals in whose lives reproduction - i.e. having children - is no longer of essence. Yet the yearning to create is strong. If this energy is not channelled into meaningful activity, it brings on a crisis, often in mid life," explains Victor Langheld. "This is possibly the first mid-life crisis temple in the world," he adds, with his tongue ever so slightly in his cheek.
The logistics of the endeavour are mind-boggling, to say the least. Each sculpture piece takes at least a year to be made in Mahabalipuram, southern India, by the Indian artist T. Baskaran and his co-workers. Each is cut out of massive blocks of black granite from the Kanchi district, laboriously chiselled, polished and transported in large wooden boxes by sea to Ireland. Langheld estimates it will take another 40 years or so - 20 years beyond his own expected lifetime - to complete the project.
Meanwhile, he will live and work in his cottage home in the heart of the Wicklow mountains. Isn't it lonely living in this isolated spot, often with nothing other than large, looming granite sculpture pieces for company?
"In my job, the word lonely doesn't arise. I live a charmed existence." As one of the many captions on Victor's Way states, "It's a funny old world".
