UC152

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. Dry farming, cereal crops, poplar trees planted because they grow fast and ask little of poor, stony soil. Poplar wood is structurally weak, which makes the occasional oak in those fields genuinely precious. A storm had brought one down. 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 dry for six or seven years until it was ready.

A bench is a seat and two supports. This one is simple in structure but not in form — the sinuous lines of the trunk shaped the top, and the supports were carved to follow the same language: organic, unhurried, each piece responding to the wood rather than imposing a shape on it.

The same tree also became UC150, a standing mirror. Two pieces, one fallen oak, one village, one phone call.