Elm Storywood

You can read a lot into the grain of a piece of wood. Layered on year by year, we are treated to a detailed record of when branches began to grow, how the sun shone and rain fell, what hardships the tree encountered, and how long it lived.

Storywood is a series of simple forms made from characterful pieces of wood from the Using Trees collection. Each has been meticulously prepared: cut to length, handplaned and sanded to a high grit. They are objects to touch, ogle and engage with over time. Each piece comes packaged up with a short note from Zac describing some of what can be seen in its grain.

The Storywood series comes out of Zac's 'Other Wood Pieces' exhibition presented at the Cooper Union (New York).

PIECE NOTES: Salvaged from a barn that stood in the Rouge River drainage basin, the Elm Storywood have the most annual rings of any wood in our current collection. Beginning in the 1940s, Dutch elm disease killed or caused the preemptive felling of almost all of Ontario's mature stems. Efforts are ongoing to restock this population, but elm of this age and slow growth will be unavailable commercially for generations, making these tightly ringed hardwood pieces particularly significant.

RING COUNT: est. 300

DIMENSIONS: 165 x 165 x 130-165 mm