Timber is ephemeral on site: it has a huge presence as an enabling material giving form to the building but is absent from the completed structure itself.

On the surface of these benches the echoes of departed forms build up in layers, revealing a history of actions and decisions that have allowed the building to take shape.

I began by making rubbings of their surfaces while the carpenters were at lunch but now they save them for me when they are finished with them instead of putting them in the skip.

The carpenters bench has also provided an object through which to collaborate with Mike Neilson, the museum's facsimile expert, to experiment with making 3 dimensional records of objects and surfaces.