Acquired consciousness...
For several years now, perfect wood with straight grain and no knots has been competing with what has long been thrown into the fire: split wood, with twisted grain or covered in knots. Trends have evolved, as have awareness and techniques. Not so long ago, who would have wanted a scarred top mended with butterfly keys as a living room table?
Today we love the defects of wood more and more and bring them into our homes as natural works of art. Although I have the greatest respect for classic cabinetmaking, antique, Empire or Louis XV furniture, I delight in each discovery of wood dented by life and its share of challenges. In cabinetmaking, this is heresy!
I was also marked during childhood by the quantity of wood, deemed unsuitable or defective, that my cabinetmaker grandfather condemned to the flames like common waste. Now today it is these natural "defects", these scars to be repaired that I will seek out and highlight in most of my creations, like witnesses of the life of the tree to which I grant respect and contemplation.
But here it is: how and where do I get my supplies? In our beautiful country, a few steps or kilometers from home, there is already plenty to do: The parks and gardens are full of winding fruit and ornamental trees, the regional woods and forests, although few in number in my border region, are enough to provide the classic quality species, unflattering for the cabinetmaker but ideal for me. And in many cases we do not have to be ashamed of our domestic flora compared to that of the tropics!
[Above, is this tropical apple tree? no no, local! - (ball above, root below)]
Local treasures...
A stone's throw from my home, many trees are cut down and sacrificed in the dumpster of a recycling center or in the hearth of a fireplace, while all or part of them can have the chance to proudly sit in your home. An opportunity to be seized for a greatly reduced environmental footprint. Life won't hold it against me, I think.
I am fortunate to have built a supply network over the years that is sufficient to meet my material needs. A network of professionals and individuals who regularly supply me with fruit trees, ornamental trees, decommissioned wood or wood from demolition. A material recovered or redeemed which only asks to express itself by exposing in another light its defects linked to its own existence.
My essences therefore come from my area, no trees are cut down for me. It is a set of opportunities which fills my reserves which I have taken the greatest care of for years and which very often arrive in logs, ridges, stumps with or without roots which have to be exploited and transformed for allow them to express themselves in another form.
[Above, hawthorn collected from an individual]
[a beautiful strain of laburnum with its roots, it's not every day]
I also pay a lot of attention to my own firewood by choosing local suppliers where I know the origin of the species delivered to me: Valenciennois, Mormal or more rarely from the Ardennes. Each year upon receipt, a sorting is necessary because very often certain treasures are hidden there and it is with a child's eye that I am ecstatic while holding a log of olive ash or hornbeam with a bad appearance. point... Head full of ideas!
[Left: Firewood, a significant but time-consuming source that generates a lot of losses. On the right: part of my reserve where the material finishes drying peacefully]
From the trunk to the object, respect for the material, between tradition and modernity, everything is transformed and nothing is lost!