As I wandered the opposite side of tracks of the Baixador de Vallvidrera station, just north of Barcelona, I noticed there were a great many number of stumps of varying sizes and stages of decay, clearly cut at some point in time for one reason or another.
Observing the deconstruction and decomposition of these trees, now reduced to fragments of wood, I thought about the disconnect between objects and their sources, within an environment perpetually subject to extraction.
I noticed too, traces of man made barriers once created to prohibit passage, now also subject to decomposition. Their functions now also null and void.
In a way, a stump is a stool reduced to its most basic formal expression.
Beyond that, stumps are moments in time. They are records of human activity.
This series was designed to explore the human relationship with natural materials, creating a dialogue between product, material "memory", and industrial extractive practices, through discarded tree stumps and elements commonly used in construction. These playful, yet precarious forms are executed in a raw, unfinished format, therefore “preserving” an “extract memory of the stump.”
