La Carrière Wellington, the Wellington Quarry, in the northern French city of Arras, marks an entry point to a subterranean complex created, in part, by a contingent of New Zealand tunnellers in the latter years of World War I.
Today, it is a park, a museum and the point of entry for tours of the tunnel complex.
Marian Fountain's The Earth Remembers Photo: marianfountain.com
It is also the site of a deceptively modest sculpture commemorating those New Zealanders who lived and died in creating the underground city.
Deceptive, because, from the outside it is a simple bronze pillar, its surface like a core sample of the ground on which it stands ... and it is cut through with the silhouette of a New Zealand soldier in the uniform of the time.
But step inside and you are at once surrounded by a galaxy of small faces cast in the bronze... look up and see a small patch of the sky as if from a mine shaft.
Like Dr Who’s Tardis, it feels larger inside that it appears from the outside.
Titled The Earth Remembers, it is the work of Marian Fountain, Auckland-born sculptor, but long time resident of Paris.
Vincent O'Donnell met her in her studio, in the garden of an apartment block in the 20th arrondissement and first asked about working with the crafts men and women of bronze foundries.
