UC150

Some materials arrive through supply chains. Others arrive through a phone call from your cousins.

They live in a village of sixty people in the province of Palencia — the part of Spain where Iñigo Calleja's father was born, in the kind of landscape that feeds the country quietly and without recognition. Dry farming, cereal crops, rows of poplar planted because poplar grows fast and asks little of poor, stony soil. Poplar wood, though, is structurally weak — which makes the occasional oak or walnut in those fields genuinely precious.

A storm had brought one down. It was lying in a pasture, fallen but not yet dry. His cousins called to ask if he wanted it. He drove out, loaded it into the van, and brought it back to the workshop to rest for six or seven years until it was ready.

This is a standing mirror — a larger version of UC102, a geometry AMBER had already found worked well and saw no reason to abandon. The wood is the reason this piece exists. Not as a material choice, but as a story that needed an object.

The same tree also became UC152, a bench. Two pieces, one fallen walnut tree, one village, one phone call.