It was an old custom to saw off the top of the pine tree that had been decorated in the house after Christmas. Trimmed, it turned into a whisk for stirring porridge that year. I read about it in a book of Christmas stories while reading to my two daughters before bedtime. We hadn’t brought a Christmas tree into the house, but in the middle of January, the sidewalks were full, so we took evening walks with a bag and a saw. The tree tops were trimmed – and later also shaped by steaming, peeling bark, bending, and drilling – into whisks of all kinds of variations that we gave to people around us.
Gradually, I became more attentive to the systematics by which the side branches were positioned and could increasingly read a life story from the differently grown forms that arose from damages to the growth points. The recognition of that life makes following the principles of respectful harvesting a matter of course, and thus, in the following years, I also tried to give other parts of the wood a purpose as a utensil (such as a fork, knife, broom, apple picking stick, drying rack for the harvest, lamp stand…).
When creating objects, I am searching for generating value and meaning that extends beyond the purely functional. Through the choice of materials, a slow and labor-intensive crafting process, collective creation, and the way objects are used, gifted, and passed on. The often temporary, seasonally available nature of the chosen materials determines the cyclical course of that search.
In the intentions I have to further develop the work, resonates what I read in ‘Together’ by Richard Sennett (the power of craftsmanship and rituals in learning to collaborate), in ‘The Gift’ by Marcel Mauss (how the way objects circulate in the world determines the relationships between people and society), in ‘The Gift’ by Lewis Hyde (whatever we have been given is supposed to be given away again, not kept), in ‘The social life of things’ by Arjun Appadurai (exchange is the source of valuation of objects), in ‘The Ethics of Art’ by Pascal Gielen among others (the potential to radically think through an empirically unverifiable future and make it already be felt, seen and heard in the here and now), and in ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ by Robin Wall Kimmerer (the possibility of becoming re-indigenous).
