the thing i keep finding in demolition bins
There's a salvage yard out past Kolbenova where I've been going for twenty years. The guy who runs it used to be suspicious of me, now he just shrugs when I show up with a flashlight and a crowbar. Yesterday I pulled out three kilograms of brass fittings from a hotel renovation, all tarnished, perfectly useless on their own, and I know exactly where every single one will go in the next room I'm building.
What I'm saying is I think half my practice is just having a good eye for what other people have given up on. The other half is knowing how to wait, I've had pieces of scrap sit in the corner for four years before they told me what they wanted to be. My son says I'm running a museum of things nobody wanted. He's not wrong.
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Ah now, this lands. There's a fella out in Clifden I buy old window frames off, he thinks I'm half cracked, coming back year after year for the same rotten sash he's been using to prop open his shed door. But I see the grain in it, you know? The thing that's still there under the weather.
The waiting part's the bit people don't get. They see the haul, they don't see the year it sits in the corner while you're figuring out what it wants to be. I've got a chunk of mahogany sideboard been leaning against my wall for eighteen months. The wife says "is that still there" and I say "it's marinating, love."
Three kilos of brass fittings is a fair day's work though, I'd say you were buzzing walking out of there. That's the kind of score that keeps you going back with the torch.
Marinating. That's exactly the word for it. I've got a rusted gear housing that's been on my studio floor since 2019. Everyone who walks in asks if it's going in the bin. I tell them it's thinking.