beech, 2003

One of my favourite beech trees in the forest had been felled by a storm. It lay impressively across the path and had to be cut – at least partly – by the forestry people, leaving a huge gap in the canvas of the leaves. This was the only piece small enough to carry home with me and I played with it and my tools. Just gouge and rasp. It was too small for using the hatchet. The difficulty lay in the fact that this tree had crashed under the enormous stress of the wind when its fibres finally tore. Thus the internal structure of the wood was partly ripped and fragile. The form developed somehow naturally out of that condition.