Hooked, 2026

Hakan Trulsson  

Carved Cretan olive wood, acrylic, steel post, slate base

A single curved form, twisted through its length so the eye is carried from the base up and over the crest and down through the opening at the centre. There is no front: the piece reads differently from every angle, closing into a solid mass from one side and opening into a loop from another.

One edge is worked with a gouge into a field of overlapping scallops and finished in teal acrylic, the pigment held in the tool marks so the cells sit dark against a paler rim. Against the honey and caramel of the polished wood, the band behaves like the broken edge of a wave.

The material is olive () from Crete. Olive is not grown for timber — the wood becomes available only when an orchard tree is pruned hard or finally taken out after generations of bearing fruit, so every block carries the crooked, slow-grown history of the tree it came from. That history is what produces the figure here: dense, oily, interlocked grain shot through with dark streaks, the record of a trunk that grew a fraction of a millimetre a year on a dry Cretan hillside. Crete has been cultivating olives since the Minoans, and some trees on the island are counted in millennia rather than centuries.

Mounted on a black steel post and a round slate base.