As a group, we defined a brief for a stool, which we each then had 3 days to interpret, design and prototype. The following is an excerpt from my proposal:
As I wandered the opposite side of tracks of the Baixador de Vallvidrera station, just north of Barcelona, I noticed there were a 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 products and their sources, within an environment perpetually subject to extraction. I thought of the classic wooden stool.
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 immediacy and in-situ remnants, creating a dialogue between product creation, material "memory", and industrial activity, through discarded tree stumps and elements commonly used in construction.
