What if a tree could be understood not simply as a source of timber, but as an entire material vocabulary? This question lies at the heart of Reconfiguration of a Tree, a research project by Thomas Vailly, developed in collaboration with David Derksen, Garðar Eyjólfsson and Lex Pott. Beginning with the maritime pine (Pinus pinaster), the designers investigate the material potential contained within the tree itself, separating its principal constituents—wood and resin—and exploring how they might be transformed, recombined and given new purpose.
The investigation reverses a familiar industrial relationship with nature. Rather than treating the tree as a ready-made resource to be cut into standardised components, the project looks more closely at its inherent properties. Wood provides structure, texture and direction; resin offers a contrasting substance, capable of binding, coating and consolidating. Through experimentation, these materials are brought into new relationships, revealing possibilities that conventional processing might overlook. A distinctive dark resin, derived from the tree, becomes both a material in its own right and a means of reconsidering the wood around it. The resulting studies move between raw matter, material samples and functional forms, allowing the research to develop through observation and making.
The familiar appearance of pine gives way to something less expected: a material landscape of contrasting surfaces, densities, colours and behaviours.
Across the project, the designers move between disciplines that are often separated in industrial production: material research, manufacturing, experimentation and object design. The tree becomes both subject and collaborator, its natural composition providing the starting point for an alternative approach to fabrication.
Reconfiguration of a Tree proposes a different way of thinking about resources—not as isolated materials waiting to be extracted, but as interconnected systems whose potential remains only partly understood. It asks what design might discover by looking more carefully at the matter already available to us, and what new forms might emerge when the boundaries between natural material and manufactured object begin to dissolve.
