Why Designer Drew Seskunas Sawed Off This Weird Tree Root
He explains why, exactly, he was drawn to its unusual natural tension.
He explains why, exactly, he was drawn to its unusual natural tension.
My father-in-law has a house on the North Fork of Long Island that my family and I often visit. I surf, but there are no waves there, so it’s this strange form of nightmare for me. It’s still a beautiful, pebbly beach, but since I can’t surf, I’m often bored and rooting around for stuff to do. All kinds of driftwood washes up there, so I’ll build stuff out of it or just walk up and down exploring all the huge glacial erratics dotting the shore. One time, a bad storm washed up a lot of trees on the beach, and I found a gigantic one that was half buried in the sand with its roots growing around granite rocks. I thought it was gorgeous, so I biked home to get a saw so I could cut out a section, but when I came back, I couldn’t find it. A few weeks later I returned to the beach, and there it was, so I hacked off this piece.
I call it a root rock, and it reminds me of the tension I try to find in my work. For my architecture and object designs, I often have a desire to impose order on the natural quality of the materials I use. For my lighting designs, I work with bark paper, hemp, and cedarwood. There’s always a negotiation between what I want to achieve and what the material wants to do, and I’ve learned that I have to let the material dictate how a piece is going to come together, at least to some degree. The root rock embodies that—the rock looks like a man-made cube, and the wood is so organically shaped. They have a tension but are in balance at the same time.
I had the root rock in my studio for a while, but now my wife and I keep it in our living room. People come over and ask, "How did you get the rock in there?" They don’t believe it grew like that, because it looks like a sculpture. I like having it around because it reminds me of the feeling I get in nature, which is this deep sense of wonder, especially at the different scales of time operating all around us. We have our human time scale, but there is also the scale of nature, which allows you to see something much larger than yourself. The root rock is a tangible record of that.
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