I discovered this bitternut hickory branch among leaves and twigs, its nuts camouflaged on the forest floor. As the wood decayed, the shells began to split. The unspooling mirrored the separation of blossoms and offshoots from the parent tree. Each fragment had once been joined to another and had, in some measure, fallen away. Disposable to the tree’s exigency, these pieces nonetheless held the latent possibility of new growth: a branch, a sapling, a future.
My aim was to preserve both the act of falling and the inexorable slide toward dissolution, reproducing the object as I found it among the detritus. The forms are rendered in stage‑dyed tissue paper stained with coffee and suspended on fine threads, themselves secured to overhead wooden slats bent into tension. There are no straight lines in the work; the sole direct vector is the downward pull of the threads.
