Crab Apple - Grand Pointe - 26"

Why this one exists

Rescued from a firewood seller's lot in Grand Pointe: a gigantic pile of oak, ash and maple destined for fireplaces, with something interesting buried in it every so often. This was the something interesting. Crab apple, with unbelievable texture on the inside. It joined the flame series for the most literal reason any piece has ever earned it: this wood was being sold as fuel, and it became fire's portrait instead. The form keeps the junction where two boughs diverged, and where the second bough was cut away I left the face exactly as the saw made it, untouched, unvarnished, unsanded, one plain fact standing in the middle of a sculpture. Everything else feels amazing under your hands. And like every flame in the series, its silhouette rearranges itself completely with each step you take around it.

It stood here

Where this crab apple originally grew, nobody can say; by the time I met it, it was firewood in waiting on a seller's lot in Grand Pointe, in a pile the size of a house. That pile is its provenance, and the rescue is the story. The pin marks the lot's community, not an orchard.

Every side of it