“We all know that feeling too well; knowing that Monday morning is looming…. it takes the edge off Sunday Afternoon’s relaxed state of mind…”

I use this as metaphor to describe the current state of our civilisation in relation to our world ecosystem and the carbon equation we are each party to…

Almost everything we do is physically transferring heat and carbon to our atmosphere. In this civilisation, we are each stacking up our carbon units, our material wealth, appeasing our needs for comfort and for self worth. Whether or not our environs will support such stacks of energy, we continue to stack, and stack we must.

I started to stack mainly to get the wood up off the ground! With the wood stove running all year round, I was making sure the wood was dry in the shortest time to keep up with family demands. Then I found I was rushing from collecting wood to holding the baby, to making a living from sculpture…

Quite organically the three elements to my demanding world combined; the children and I sculpted a circular bird hide from wood. The forest tits and robins would crowd around us as we chopped wood, scoring their grub at the clap of the block splitter. The children would hide inside the doorway of our stacked igloo form while the birds twittered right up to their noses in search of wooded goodies.

I build many stacks now, at festivals and on private landscapes. It is often said that these firewood stacks would look excellent in full blaze, especially in the cold of Tasmania… It is certainly my natural, almost prehistoric urge to set off such an edifice. But nowadays I am affected by that feeling of Monday morning looming. I am content to use the materials sparingly to cook or to heat some little home in the country, or perhaps to just look at.

Sunday Afternoons are when we do get to let our thoughts drift and wander, when we might get to chop our own wood, and to prepare for the coming days…