Ábaco

Every figure here was counted, bead by bead.
The image is arithmetic before it is a picture.

An abacus holds numbers as beads on a wire — a way of counting made of things you can touch. Ábaco borrows the mechanism and forgets the sum. Thousands of wooden beads are threaded across an open fibre mesh, and out of pure counting a figure appears.

Nothing here is drawn. Each shape is built position by position, bead by bead, in black and natural wood — a geometry that has to be counted before it can be seen. Get one bead wrong and the figure shifts. This is image as arithmetic: the triangle exists because someone kept the count.

Iron draws the frame, holds the tension and carries the hooks — and finishes in beads of its own, so the same small round unit runs from the thread to the metal. One module, the whole piece through.

Raised to the height of a column, a counting device becomes architecture. And it still works as a coat rack: what hangs from the iron changes through the day, while behind it the figure stays, counted once and holding.