About a year ago, I noticed severed tree trunks around abandoned Soviet-era garages near a train station. Stripped of both roots and crowns, they were so deformed and so tightly fused with the fence that the communal service workers decided to leave them as they were.

After reading Peredelkino by the Soviet poet [NAME] Yeremenko, I recalled these stumps. The image of trees deformed by the conditions of their existence evoked the fractured destinies of many Soviet poets and writers. Fortunately, the fence with the trees impaled on it remained in place. And here they are – dissected, cast in plaster, resembling limbs – impressions of time, suspended among the living and intact, bearing witness to collision, to what has been endured.

This work was made for the Alexander Eremenko memorial show in Peredelkino