It’s not often someone offers you the bottom 6 meters of a 150 year old tree.  It had been lying outside in a cow field in the middle of nowhere for 30 years. A local farmer offered it to me if I could move it,  but then I just so happened to know someone with a 15 ton forestry machine.

I am not really a lover of chain saw style furniture / art but I saw this as a challenge to create something more useful and beautiful from a rotting object. I decided to make a bench much in the same style as my Silkworm bench made in 2004, where the overall form would balance on a small footprint.

I spent hours looking at the tree trunk before and during the chainsaw carving process and slowly found the form I wanted. I tried not to go with the natural grain or be inspired by the form of the original object which is what I saw as being the big no no.  That’s to crafty for me.

In the the end I removed over half the trucks original volume so as to get a bench that was both a good height for sitting and climbing around on.

The Oak bench is on display outside Galleri Vals as part of the Wild Things summer exhibition in Håverud, Sweden.

20100508-CD 

Oak truck as found

Finished bench