The wok shade is a very dark, dingy piece that is also very personable. It reminds me of Old New York. The city with the dark alleyways, pee-soaked streets, and constant demonstrations. The kind of city that would inspire movies like Escape From New York.
There isn't really much to say for the rod, just that it's an old hollow broomstick that hides the electric wire quite efficiently. The mass at the bottom is repurposed pine wood from our friendly local lumber yard. As with all repurposed things, it is interesting to imagine what the piece has seen in its time on Earth. The exposed rings on its top reveal that the tree it came from was at least 100 years old; I counted 96 clear rings, and it must have had at least a couple more beyond the cut. The tree's health is laid out and its cross-section is its postmortem. Through the tree's health, you can see a century of life in a single point on Earth: the draughts, the floods, the ground nutrients, the rising and dropping temperatures… A tactile history of Earth.Overlaid onto that century of growth is a clearly long history serving people. Layers of paint, mysterious rusted nail holes on a rounded surface that seems terribly structurally unstable… In my mind's eye, it was part of a porch somewhere in Queens. How many people passed this stump as they walked up their porch steps daily? What history has unfolded here?
