Research projects around the log Guillaume Thireau

"Over the years, when winter comes, the log arrives in certain interiors with its bark, its moss, its woodlice... This co-existence of a piece of raw material in the middle of transformed, artificial universes that are our domestic spaces is very present, visible. This remarkable presence of the log is also notable for its cultural depth in collective memory and our daily practices, which is particularly interesting since it resists the forgetting of everyday life. As for example in the language with the popular expressions "to show what wood we are heating ourselves", bucher which means to work in slang, the Christmas log, or even in the imagination with where Gepetto takes a log to come and sculpt it Pinocchio, the woman with the log in Twin Peaks…

From a material point of view, it is a piece of wood for heating, comprising an aesthetic, a texture, a shape, a volume, a set of elements that forms its identity.

Through this project, my desire was to change the image of the consumable attached to the log, by going to the limits of it and therefore to question its definition, by not remaining confined to the maximum size of fireplace inserts by example. In this trip to the borders of the log, the goal was to inspire me from the cultural universe that the log possesses, in order to produce objects that speak for themselves.

In this way, after all research, a collection of objects has emerged, distinguished in three aspects (narrative, treatment, volume) and reflecting the identity and spirit of the log. We therefore find the narrative side of the log through the recumbent trunk which becomes moving and domesticated; where it bends at the play of the corners and notches to come to be arched. That of the treatment by this minimum gesture of laying bare the raw wood which creates a difference in level, thus being able to accommodate an external material providing use. Then that of the volume, which by a vocabulary of cutting allows to transform the log into different objects with simple assemblies of journals. "