Denny Culbert
Bousillage artist Dale Pierrotte holds one of his electric guitar sculptures. The strings are made of tarabi, the strong, wiry fiber left after Spanish moss has been dried.
Carencro’s Dale Pierrottie likes to play in the mud. Clay to be exact. Over the years, he’s turned a simple ingredient found in Acadiana backyards into an art form.
Pierrottie creates his art pieces from the construction material called bousillage, a combination of clay and cured Spanish moss traditionally used in the walls of Cajun and Creole homes as a natural insulation. The clay-and-moss mixture kept Louisiana interiors cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
Pierrottie taught himself how to make bousillage after his grandfather unearthed an old chimney filled with the mixture. The experience inspired him, Pierrottie said, and he began working on restoring and creating bousillage walls in historic homes.
Pierrottie restores bousillage walls and creates the insulation for historic properties as well, including Baton Rouge’s Magnolia Mound, the Broussard House at Vermilionville in Lafayette, and Natchitoches’ Oakland Plantation.
Not Topsoil
One thing bousillage is not is topsoil, Pierrottie insisted. Dig down beneath the soil layer, and you will find a clay tier throughout most of Acadiana, part of the Mississippi alluvial plain. Not all clay is the same either. Clay from Bayou Vermilion in Lafayette Parish, for instance, sometimes has a reddish tint. The river’s sediment originally came from the Red River, Pierrottie explained, which is why that tributary got its name. Clay from the Coulee Rouge in St. Landry Parish offers a deeper red, he said; and underlying sandstone influences the clay of southwest Louisiana’s Bayou Nezpiqué.
Louisiana’s native populations used Spanish moss and clay to insulate their homes, but they didn’t cure the moss beforehand, Pierrottie explained. The French preferred a strong fiber in their bousillage and cured the moss by drying it for a month, until the outer strands rotted and fell off. What’s left is a wiry fiber called tarabi, so strong that rural residents used it to haul cypress logs, Pierrottie said.
A Big Screen Beginning
A turning point in Pierrottie’s career was when he worked on Belizaire the Cajun, the 1986 film for which he was hired by director Glen Pitre to restore a chimney and to create other set props.
“That was the beginning of my art, doing Glen Pitre’s Belizaire the Cajun back in 1985,” he said. “People started calling me about doing restorations.”
Pierrottie has worked on numerous historic homes and buildings since the filming, plus he started making smaller bousillage chimneys as art pieces, many embellished with church glass and other elements.
Now he creates a wide variety of artwork out of the trademark clay such as masks, figurines, Mardi Gras moss boats—even artistic bousillage guitars and violins. For his masks, the tarabi works well as hair, and he uses other clays to add color. Tarabi also doubles as guitar and violin strings, with elements such as seashells and animal bones for the instruments’ bridges and tailpieces. One guitar he created features deer antlers and crawfish claws.
“I use all native materials,” he explained, including many found in his own backyard. “I gather everything.”
A mermaid piece uses a grayish-black clay, but Pierrottie used a brass brush afterwards, then a beeswax buff, to give it a metallic quality.
“It looks like old, gilded metal,” he said. “That’s a new technique that I really like.”
He still makes desktop chimneys, in addition to other miniatures such as Native American teepees and the bird effigy from Poverty Point State Historic Site. There’s also a clay map of New Orleans, marked by neighborhoods with Indian mounds, placed where mounds used to exist, Pierrottie said.
“I’m trying to do two things at once,” he explained, “educate and entertain.”
Pierrottie also travels with his bousillage. When he inherited some old wooden beams from his Uncle Chester, Pierrottie created a mobile wall of bousillage to bring to festivals such as Jazz Fest in New Orleans and Festivals Acadiens in Lafayette where he demonstrates the technique for the crowds.
A Love of Film
Belizaire might have started Pierrottie’s career as a bousillage artist and restorer, but film as a whole ignited his love of Cajun history and culture.
A projectionist, Pierrottie’s father first introduced him to the moving image. Pierrottie later created his own home movies, then worked for KPLC-Channel 7 in Lake Charles as a part-time news reporter. When Les Blank visited Acadiana to create films on Cajun culture such as J’ai Été Au Bal (I Went to the Dance), Pierrottie was hooked.
“It woke me up to my own culture,” he said of Blank’s films. “I always loved the family thing, cooking on the bayou, seeing how stuff was done.”
He never finished his first documentary on nutria trappers, but Pierrottie has performed in commercials and films and is working on a “class values” story surrounding a medicinal spring in southwest Louisiana where oil was later discovered. The morning we met for our interview, he was to play a “redneck nazi” that afternoon for a feature film about Creole musician Amédée Ardoin and Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee, who enjoyed a unique interracial partnership during segregation.
Regardless of his medium, whether celluloid or Acadiana clay, Pierrottie seems connected to his past.
Details. Details. Details.
Pierrottie is available for home bousillage placement and sells his artwork at select festivals throughout Louisiana and at the Louisiana Marketshops, located at Exit 115 off I-10 in Henderson.
To view some of his artwork, visit facebook.com/pages/Dale-Pierrottie-Sculpture/320197171328588.
