Timber Translations

San Francisco, 2015

In the installation of board-formed concrete, textures of the timber formwork create a relief upon the surface of the concrete: a lasting memento of an organic, living material imprinted onto a rigid one. This site-specific act was a response to that construction process, asking if it was possible re-capture this embodiment of a tree's cellular structure back onto paper, another lifeless material formed from trees.

Prints rolled along various points of a board-formed concrete wall were layered in the locations from which they were collected. Resembling giant fingerprints, they act as a documentation of the built environment, magnifying and filtering the idiosyncrasies of the wood grain’s impressions.