Whitethorn (or hawthorn), is a shrub belonging to the rose family. Its hard-wooded, thorny branches are twisted, bent, and in springtime they become covered in tiny, white, pungent-scented flowers. The mythology of whitethorn associates the plant with pagan fertility rituals, with Celtic legends, and even with Christian symbology. The name the Greeks gave it, crataegus oxyacantha, means “strength and stinging thorn”, a single name containing all the shrub’s qualities. My work synthesizes the elements of the shrub that seem to me to be not in a word, as thought by the Greeks, but in a body. This body is fragmented, evoking the natural entanglement of the branches. Rather than follow the curving lines that overlap and become more impenetrable with growth, my body follows a horizontal line composed of small portions of “branches” contained in one another. At the body’s extremity, are two sharp cones, thorns embedded in the structure of which they are the beginning and the end. The thorns’ alignment, their curve, creates an open space, a space that invites those who cross it to lower their defenses, to become more approachable. Like a wild animal soothed by a gesture, their breathing becomes shallower and surface tension slackens. Thus, an encounter becomes possible and if withdrawn, the thorns are themselves part of the trunk, ready to blossom in the form of tiny, pungent-scented flowers, a homage to their former selves.