June 2001
When Pierre Bataille came to visit his daughter in Plymouth, Michigan, he met her boss, Patrick Gallagher, who also worked in wood. Patrick Gallagher had a giant dead tree in front of his home. Pierre Bataille, "the constant sculptor", saw an opportunity to carve this dead tree trunk into a 8-foot leprechaun. He had never worked on this type of wood before, so for him it was a challenge. First he made a small scale model of the leprechaun and than, using a mallet and an array of chisels, he whittled down the trunk with precision. There were no chainsaws involved. This "cartoonish" sculpture created a big stir in the Plymouth township.