a sculptor of wisdom

WORLD SCULPTURE NEWS 47WINTER 2011

Some of the most captivating objects at the major David Nash exhibition, which closes this month [February 27, 2011] at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP), are the least worked.

Descending the steps to the main dis-play garden, the visitor is engaged by three great pieces of eucalyptus trunk, two recumbent and one standing on the manicured lawn in front of a dark and perfect hedge. Bleaching and weathering under a northern English sky, they invite touch; their bark feels warm and silky, like mouse-fur, under the hazy sun of the fine September day when I visited. One can easily imagine this dismembered giant from California, called Three Butts (2010), is breathing.

Another piece forms the entrance desk in the nearby gallery and by it, a highly crenellated slice of the same spe-cies leans against the wall, cut from the great Oculus Block (2010) that forms a centerpiece in one of the rooms. As both a sculpture and a picture, this off-cut re-sembles a slice of human brain complete with its ventricle, but its exuberant lobes also suggest gestures. So surely has David

Nash mastered the language of wood over the past 40 years of secluded study in North Wales that, as this meticulously planned and serenely triumphant exhibition testi-fies, he not only speaks it, but also thinks in it and moves with it. Nash has achieved an international following—the catalogue’s opening essay is by the American novel-ist Annie Proulx—and his works are in major public collections from Australia to Japan and Venezuela, with many in the United States.

Not all the works here are made of wood, but nearly all of them began life as such, and a few, such as Lightning Strike (2008), have been cast in iron, steel, or bronze, while some have significantly used coal. His works, especially the great seed pod Red Column (2010), have an organic quality, but on the whole he does not represent botanical geometries in the manner of another contemporary British sculptor to appear at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Peter Randall-Page.

It is not news that wood, along-side stone, is a fundamental material of human technology with a profound and complex history. Likewise with trees and

A Sculptor Of WisdomThe English sculptor David Nash has mastered the language of wood over the past 40 years to which

his recent triumphant exhibition testifies. Nash lives, dreams, thinks, and moves with the rhythms of

wood. For Nash wood is as alive as humanity with its own highly developed characteristics.

By Marius Kwint

David Nash, Three Butts, 2010, eucalyptus. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

David Nash, Red Column, 2010, Californian redwood, height: approx. 6 m. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

48 WORLD SCULPTURE NEWS WINTER 2011

forests more generally. The cumula-tive insight of Nash is, however, that wood is also tissue and flesh, mucosal and suppurating, each part and spe-cies with its own odor, texture, and deeply evolved characteristics, or what Nash calls, quite legitimately, ‘wisdom.’ Good carpenters will of course tell you this, but their skills are usually put to exploitative purposes, reducing a tree to mere structural members or aesthetic comforts: felled, seasoned, sawed, planed, and polished, a mag-nificent ancient organism is contained and subdued.

Nash’s contrasting thesis is not just the truism of the sublime—that the cosmos is greater than we are—but that other species within it

are our fellows, and the fact that he anatomizes naturally fallen trees with a chainsaw (calling them ‘wood quar-ries’) is out of curiosity and respect, not domination or alienation. Nature here is not here figured as an abstract concept, but realized, which provides the show with a rare gravitas, visceral potency and range of meanings.

The imagery is traumatic as well as sensual and tender, but the abiding feeling is one of tranquility and

well being through the demonstration of an essential continuum—an almost religious absolution. Nash is a student of the Rudolph Steiner’s anthroposophi-cal movement, an amalgamation of world’s ethical and metaphysical sys-tems, though he does not come across as mystifying. “Spirituality lies in the physical,” he said in a 2004 interview with Susan Daniel McElroy at the Tate St. Ives, “... if you really engage with a natural material, it will give you a threshold into a far deeper state of ‘thinking-feeling.’”

A major theme in his work is the cycle of nature through the four Aristotelian elements: earth, air, water, and fire, the last of which he employs to char his sculptures and in his use of charcoal as a drawing medium. Many of his drawings are shown, including a fascinating genealogy of his forms entitled Family Tree, and some are on sale for very reasonable prices. Drawing is not just a means to an end, but a performance consistent with his principles. Speaking of the discipline, he says: “There’s the idea, the will, the gesture, and the gesture’s there on the drawing for all to see.”

T h i s i s Un i t ed Na t i on s International Year of Forests, but, al-though global deforestation has slowed

David Nash, Lightning Strike, 2008, corten steel, height: 5 m. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

David Nash, Oculus Block, 2010. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.


a little in recent years, humans are still destroying a swath the size of Panama every year, and thus making hundreds of species, many of them unknown, extinct every day. Britain’s Conservative-led government has only just abandoned plans to privatize its National Forests, thanks to massive public outcry. Boorish Anglo-American discourse denigrates en-vironmentalists as ‘tree-huggers;’ at this exhibition, embracing wood is exactly what I, and many others, did. As I press my face into the charred gashes of Two Sliced Cedars (2010), the aromas envelop and suffuse me, evoking smoky, exotic dreamlands; Levantine coasts.

David Nash could be regarded one of the principal heirs to a char-acteristically British, tentative Modernism that incorporated, rather than rejected, pastoral

Romanticism. Certainly the comparison with Barbara Hepworth’s sentinels in the landscape is tempting, but many of her works were finished to resemble the sculpting effects of wind and water; Nash, by contrast, often leaves the rough mark of man and machine inescapably evident, adding, as Ben Tufnell points out in the splendid catalogue, “truth to tools” to the modernist dictum of truth to materials. The chainsaw, which he began to use around 1976, is the instrument by which Nash explores the cycles of destruction and creation.

Time and process are his ultimate interests. “Trees show their time-story through their form,” Nash writes in the catalogue, “In life they stand balanced, spreading, defiant, weaving the elemental forces of light, warmth, water, air, and earth into their material body. In death their wood continues to change; bright and fresh at first, easy to split and work until it dries and cures into hard and useful lengths .... There is another way of working .... Instead of resisting the effects of decay and ero-sion, one can engage with them.”

Nash talks of “putting the form into time, and letting the time work on it.” In the gardens is Black Dome (1986), made

of charred stumps (and referenced by his recent Chinese Irons). The installation has been worn down by the elements and the feet of countless playful visitors (the Park is popular with young families) into some-thing resembling the prehistoric burial-mounds that dot the British countryside,

reminding the island inhabitants that other cultures once thrived there.

His most radical act in this direc-tion was roughly carving a large Wooden Boulder from a fallen oak, which by ac-cident got wedged in the waterfall of a mountain stream in Wales as he was trying

David Nash, Wooden Boulder. Above left from top: 1978, 1978, 1979, and 1981; above right from top: 2002, 2003, 2003, and 2003. Photographs by David Nash.

David Nash, Black Dome, 1986. Above left: photograph by David Nash in 1993; above right: photograph by Pete Telfer, 2010.


to move it in 1978. He left it there, and over the decades, with a few interventions when it got stuck, it made its way to the estuary mouth. He assumed it floated away on the Irish Sea, before it re-emerged nearby in May 2009 from the coastal silt that had buried it for some five years, and where it remains. Documentary video, drawings and photographs of this touching and sympathetic work are on display in one of the galleries; it has much more profound poetry than so much land art, which often just turns the landscape into a temporary canvas to be photographed.

National ‘schools’ are dubious (though regrettably still cur-rent) art-historical categories. Some of the most influential forebears for Nash were pre-

eminently international, including the Romanian-Parisian Constantin Brancusi and other members of the continental and American avant garde. Born into a conventional middle-class family in the Surrey suburbs of London in 1945, Nash was sent to a private boys’ boarding school in the south coast town of Brighton. There the charismatic and contrarian art master, Gordon Taylor, a forthright advocate of Cezanne and the Bauhaus, defended his

artistic disciples against the condescending hierarchy of the school’s classical curricu-lum (though, ironically, he concreted over his own garden because he disliked the untidiness of plants).

Cezanne’s Modernist-Platonist de-sire to treat the “landscape as cube, cone, and sphere” certainly rubbed off: Pyramid Sphere Cube (1997) stands in one of the

galleries, a trinity in three dimensions, each with its counterpart in two, like shadows on the wall in the Allegory of the Cave. The successful reconciliation of form and concept throughout his work is precisely because he understands the ten-sion between the ideal and the real: “Ideas are flexible,” he says in a filmed interview, “materials are less flexible than ideas.”

David Nash, Pyramid Sphere Cube, 1997, charred oak and canvas. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

David Nash, Two Sliced Cedars, 2010, charred cedar. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.


As a student at Kingston, Brighton, and Chelsea Colleges of Art in the 1960s, Nash painted like Kandinsky and built fantastic outdoor towers and arches of brightly colored beams, crescents and rods inspired by the newly established British sculptors Anthony Caro and Philip King, the American David Smith and the Armenian-born painter Arshile Gorky. The German-born Kurt Schwitters (d. 1948) and his Merzbau (‘junk-building’) were also important influences. A number of Nash’s early sketches, studies, paintings, and documentary photographs and videos are on display in the various galleries at YSP, as well as his more recent smaller sculptures arrayed on shelves like a tidy white workshop.

Learning much from London’s thriv-ing and diverse sculpture scene, in-cluding The New Generation: 1965 show at the pioneering Whitechapel Art Gallery, Nash nevertheless

sought the cheap and peaceful lifestyle that would facilitate his art. While still a student in 1966 he bought, for a modest price, two cottages in Blaenau Ffestiniog, a small slate-mining town in the mountains of North Wales, where his parents took him on holiday. Two years later, he moved to Capel Rhiw, a disused Methodist chapel in the same town, for a mere £200 and set about arduously converting it to his home and studio. Now it forms an intrigu-ing and much-visited repository of his works, like some Victorian mu-seum for the bones of prehistoric behemoths yet to be finally stored and classified.

This region, known to the English as Snowdonia, has long afforded only a hard living to the local populace but during the 19th century became (like the English Lake District where Schwitters ended his days) a destination first for Romantic poets and artists, then for middle-class tourists. The landscape painter Richard Wilson (1714–1782) and the poet William Wordsworth (1770–1850) appreci-ated its jagged, cloudy peaks as a local Alps; the latter especially, when continental travel was pre-vented by the Napoleonic Wars. By Nash’s time, however, it boasted no established artistic colonies like Hepworth’s fishing town of St. Ives in Cornwall, Benjamin Britten’s Suffolk coastal heaths, or the Bloomsbury Group’s rolling Sussex down-land. The landscape was not even especially wooded, but, like much of upland Britain, scrubbed by onetime glaciers, its thin, peaty soil leached and long

the slate tips, the gigantic engagement of human will with nature.” His retreat was because of discipline, not reclusion, and his diary from his early days at Capel Rhiw records him driving himself hard. Even as

a student the caretakers had to let him in to start in the studio at seven o’clock every morning.

As the enjoyable documen-tary film accompanying the exhi-bition (available on the YSP web-site) shows, he projects a gentle and obliging personality that has worked closely with Peter Murray, the executive director of YSP, and other staff since its inception in 1977, first exhibiting there in a group show entitled Wood in 1979. The curator Helen Pheby explained to me how Nash fits the YSP’s aim of doing more than merely placing public art that is so often bombastic and mediocre. Here is ethically committed art as a “lifestyle inves-tigation,” in her words. This is not, of course, mere cant, but a material outcome of the mode of commis-sioning, in which the works are conceived and gestated as part of the landscape.

Decisive originality became apparent in his work from the early 1970s, when he began to toy with bundles of frayed cord, sticks, and occasional ready-mades such as spoons and sieves. This bric-a-brac has shades of 1970s neo-Dada à la Joseph Beuys, but is more earnestly

over-grazed. This Spartan habitat neverthe-

less proved congenial to the industrious young artist: “I liked the raw physicality of Blaenau,” Nash writes. “The quarrying,

David Nash, An Awful Falling (installation detail), 2001, beech, charred beech, paper, charcoal, dimensions variable. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

David Nash, Nine Cracked Balls, 1970, ash. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.


redolent of rural makeshift and dy-ing material cultures than art-world savvy. Nash held his first solo show in York in 1973: an exploration of the dynamics of carving entitled Briefly Cooked Apples, for reasons that were neither mysterious nor pretentious. “The title ... came from my misreading a sign on a van, ‘Bramley Cooking Apples,’ as ‘Briefly Cooked Apples,’ which prompted an association with my attitude to carving,” he told Sabine Schlenker. “Briefly cooked apples are much better than over cooked. Briefly carved wood is better than over carved.”

In this debut he included the important work, Nine Cracked Balls (1970), pieces of ash cut to induce a large crack. He said to Schlenker: “The idea was to act simple and direct with a piece of wood .... Wood is from a tree—start with the given shape of the tree .... Cut all round and through. The wood that is left has a curved surface textured by the many axe cuts. When the cutting has released a rounded rough wood lump, a single form exists born out of an action that has thou-sands of years of history.”

In Nash’s hands, crafts and mechaniza-tion are very much social, political, and economic matters, part of an ecology, and neither nature nor art offers any retreat from the world of events. An

Awful Falling (2001), for example, depicts the wreckage of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11 that year. “It was not my intention to respond through my work,” explains Nash, “but an off-cut from

a beech cube I was making at that time stood with three leaning verticals that looked hauntingly like one of the images of the devastation appearing in the press coverage. It needed only a few cuts to bring it into closer visual association.... The feeling of diverting my materials, tools, habit of working to this imagery seemed to articulate the hollowed-out space in my emotional guts; instead of being cut adrift I felt connected.”

When he goes into the separate space where that work is kept, “the feel-ing of that time is strongly present, and reminds me of how human consciousness of the world changed at that moment.”

Another earlier work calmly repudi-ates the American architect Buckminster Fuller’s Cold-War concept of protecting New York City from nuclear attack or more gradual environmental degradation by means of a giant glass dome, which was satirized in The Simpsons Movie in

2007. Ash Dome, begun on Nash’s plot of experimental woodland at Cae’n-y-Coed in 1977, used tradi-tional coppicing techniques to train some ash saplings into a sparse and leafy rotunda, challenging Fuller’s dystopian and defeatist vision of the future with a living, growing evocation of times when the woods were our architecture.

For British audiences, how-ever, a more sonorous ideological note is struck by Nash’s use of coal—a metamorphic destiny, of course, for the wood on which he has based his career. He is very aware that beneath the pic-turesque vistas of YSP run aban-

doned seams and galleries of the West Yorkshire Coalfield, where generations of un-commemorated workers toiled and frequently died in the dust and darkness to provide the wealth for the aristocratic stately homes, such as Bretton Hall, whose grounds the Park occupies. For YSP in 1982, as Margaret Thatcher’s govern-ment was setting about laying waste to the coal industry and the communities that depended on it (hence eviscerating the British labor movement), Nash made Barnsley Lump, a hip-high, rough obelisk of the local black gold.

And in 2010, to replace the steps of Oxley Bank, overlooking the Hall and its lake, he installed 71 broad oak steps, care-fully charred and oiled to an ebony sheen, and bedded them on 30 tons of Barnsley coal—“a great avalanche of coal,” he says. To the Romantic generation, landslides and avalanches, among other sublime spectacles, often served as metaphors for political upheaval and revolution. These were, however, pictorial or poetic fantasies that, in painted or printed form, could be, and usually were, privately owned. Here, by contrast, the ‘avalanche’ is limited by its concreteness but awakens the thoughtful audience nonetheless eloquently. Moreover, Yorkshire Sculpture Park is enjoyed by the public free of charge. Artistic progress is evidently possible. ∆

Main Sources:1. http://www.ysp.co.uk/exhibitions/david-

nash (includes photos, videos, and reviews).2. Coulson, S., Lilley, C. and Nash, D. (Eds.).

(2010), David Nash at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, exhibition catalogue. West Bretton, Wakefield: Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

3. Pheby, H. (2010), David Nash at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, Wakefield: Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

Dr. Marius Kwint, art historian and writer, is senior lecturer at the University of Portsmouth, School of Art, Design and Media, England.

David Nash at Ash Dome, September 2009. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

David Nash’s studio, Capel Rhiw, September 2009. Photograph by Jonty Wilde. Image: Courtesy of Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

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