Wildwood

by Roger Deakin

  Some of the work I had seen before, in galleries and exhibitions, but encountering it off duty in the workmanlike surroundings of the chapel, a long way from the urban world of culture and the arts, is a quite different experience. Nash now works in a separate workshop and yard up the road where his chainsaws won’t disturb anyone, so the chapel and its contents have become, quite consciously, an installation. There is soon to be another international exhibition, this time in Orléans, and several works are being wrapped up and packaged ready for their journey to France, here and at the new workshop. Some are already in packing cases, wood within wood, and stand like suitcases in the hall on the eve of a holiday. Waiting to be wrapped up is a pair of Ubus, named after the outsized King and Queen in Alfred Jarry’s Absurdist play Ubu Roi. The wandering, priapic, outward-leaning, etiolated dinosaur necks of these creatures reach upwards from the contrasting solidity of their squat bodies like the branches of the tree they actually are. Nash keeps on returning to this form. Like Nash’s various ladders, trees have traditionally connected the earth and sky, and the natural vertical axis, the direction the wood grain takes the eye, runs through all his work. ‘The problem with wood is it’s already beautiful,’ says Nash. ‘How do you make it more beautiful?’

  I find myself drawn to one work in particular: the Cracking Box of oak. As if entering the wild life of the wood, or at least taking its side, Nash has put as many difficulties in his way in the making of the box as he can. He may work with the skills of the forester, hedge-layer or carpenter but firmly rejects any notion of craft and indeed declined, for years, the open offer of a Crafts Council exhibition. You can feel that resistance, dramatized in his wilful transgression of the rules of carpentry in the construction of the box. Five of its six oaken walls are sawn, perversely, across the end grain of the tree, anchored to a single wall conventionally machined along the grain. Nash bored out the peg holes with a two-inch hand augur and carved oak pegs, which he drove in to join up the box. The anarchic work thumbs its nose at the basic rules of woodwork, triumphantly so, because it holds together in spite of the wriggling of the wood as it warps and cracks. The more the wood struggles, the tighter the grip of the oak pegs in their augured sockets. As Nash points out, hand-carved oak pegs make the best joints because their uneven surfaces create greater friction as they are driven in. This is what he calls an ‘outside in’ work. He made it from green oak outdoors, where the feeling is quite different from working inside the studio, then brought it inside to crack and warp. Things look bigger when they come inside and smaller when they go outside, by a factor of about one third, says Nash.

  Nash works in the same tradition of the artist as artisan as Constantin Brancusi, an acknowledged influence since his earliest days, who was a trained carpenter as well as sculptor and also lived at his studio, which he kept peopled with his best works. These days Nash works principally with the chainsaw, transformed in his hands into a tool of great delicacy as well as one of power and scope. He says he is a sprinter by nature, too impatient to see results to work more slowly with hand tools as he used to do until 1977, when he stopped sawing firewood with a bowsaw and discovered a tool that suited his nature. The chainsaw liberates him to work in bold strokes. It is perhaps the equivalent of the charcoal with which Nash likes to draw, also working fast: he loves its fluidity. The chainsaw lends itself to big, ambitious ideas, enabling him to work on a large scale, quarrying the wood from the tree. He makes no distinction between ‘wood’ and ‘tree’ because the green wood in which he works still has a dynamic, organic life of its own and will continue to shift, warp and reshape itself as a living sculpture. Nash prefers his work unadorned, leaving the marks of the tool on the wood. The chainsaw leaves circular marks, often blackened. The axe leaves roughness and torn slivers. Polished or finished surfaces resist your gaze, distracting it from the essential form. Instead, Nash’s grainy, cracked, warped, sawn, fissured, charred, scarred and hollowed works absorb light, involve the viewer, like the bold charcoal drawings that precede them and sometimes accompany them on a gallery wall as a two-dimensional counterpoint to the sculpture’s three.

  Nash always begins with an idea: it is ideas that excite him and drive the work along. On a blackboard in the little converted shop across the street he uses as his drawing studio, and for seminars and workshops with the groups of art students who sometimes make the journey here, he has chalked up the trajectory of a putative project that begins with Idea. He likes the dynamic implications of the word, its forward-tending energy and movement. On the blackboard, arrowed chalk lines lead off in all directions like comettails to possible interpretations. There too are chalked the names of some fellow artists of his generation whose work and ideas are akin to his: Richard Long, Hamish Fulton and Roger Ackling. Family Tree, drawn in pastel in 1995, traces the evolution of consistent ideas and themes in Nash’s work from the First Tower he built in 1967 on a hillside in Blaenau Ffestiniog. Appraising a life’s work to date as a formal tree, Nash represents himself branching out from those early beginnings into the range and scope of his more recent projects, all related in a single living system of thought. There is more than a hint of Platonic ways of thought in all this, and Nash is a strong believer in the notion of ideal forms, returning again and again to the sphere, the pyramid and the cube. Wood often suggests the past, memory and something fixed, so to work as freely with it as Nash does can create fertile tensions. We are accustomed to spheres, pyramids and cubes as sculptural objects in stone, not wood.

  Nash chose early on in his career to work in wood, in preference to stone. For him, it offers just the right degree of resistance. Stone has too much and clay too little. Chiselling oak, he feels a balancing strength coming back up his arm. Carving lime, he senses its receptivity, the smoothness of movement through it. He is interested in the past life of the tree, in its relationship with time and the diary it keeps of its life in the annual rings. A tree may live eighty or a hundred years, or for several hundred years, but even then its life is not so very much longer than a human span when you compare it with stone. Our ability to identify our human lives and history with trees influenced Nash’s choice of wood as his sculptural medium. Wood, unlike stone, lives and dies on a human scale. This idea is expressed in the old English folk-saying based on the ancient notion of the Seven Ages, quoted by Robert Graves in The White Goddess:

  The lives of three wattles, the life of a hound;

  The lives of three hounds, the life of a steed;

  The lives of three steeds, the life of a man;

  The lives of three men, the life of an eagle;

  The lives of three eagles, the life of a yew;

  The life of a yew, the length of an age;

  Seven ages, from Creation to Doom.

  A wattle or hurdle of willow will last for three years, so on this reckoning a yew lives for 729 years, a modest but reasonable estimate.

  Time and the living forces of the elements within green wood continue to shape the Crack and Warp Columns long after the artist has finished work on them. Nash has made a series of them over the years out of a variety of woods from birch to tulip to beech. Lime often creates the best effects, with its energetic warping. Working his chainsaw with extraordinary deftness, he executes a series of toothcomb incisions that may exceed a hundred into a column of green wood. The impression is of a tall sheaf of papers, all gently levitating, joined together by a solid backbone at the core. Nash says he goes into a sort of trance as he makes the repeated saw cuts, allowing the rhythm of the work to take over. At any point he might cut through that bit too much and lose the piece altogether. It is like a jazz solo: it has a beginning and an ending and a formal structure but a free, open, anarchic feeling. It is daring and risky. These crack-and-warp columns are quintessential Nash in that they tend upwards like trees, involve a virtuoso chainsaw solo and continue changing shape long after the work is apparently complete, cracking, warping and splitting at random as the element of air enters the sculpture
and water evaporates from the unseasoned wood to mingle back into ourselves through the air we breathe. These are, says Nash, air sculptures, where others might belong to earth, water or fire. There is an air of fragility about them that suggests the sculpture itself might easily evaporate.

  Like any other congregation, the sculptures in the chapel are constantly shifting, stretching and discreetly yawning as the wood silently groans and twists into subtly changed shapes. The crack and warp of green wood is nature at work, continuing where Nash has left off. Running Table and Three Dandy Scuttlers, sculptures that appear to be making a run for it or dancing on their legs of inverted branches, dramatize the dynamics at the heart of everything Nash makes. His aim, he says, is to ‘resurrect the tree in a different form’. There is a kind of collaboration between the artist and the living wood that continues well beyond the original hewing.

  We drive out to the wooded valley at Cae’n-y-Coed near Maentwrog, the next village, where Nash owns a four-acre plot of mixed woodland inherited from his father. This is where he literally plants and grows his living sculptural work. He began work on one of his best-known outdoor sculptures, Ash Dome, in 1977 when he planted twenty-two ash saplings in a ring thirty feet in diameter on a level eminence on the hillside in the Ffestiniog Valley. It was conceived as an act of hope during the dark days of the cold war. Nash had already made drawings of a lattice of living ash that would enclose a dome-shaped space. He was trying to find a way to make a large-scale outdoor sculpture that genuinely belonged in its location and would embrace and engage the elements instead of resisting them, as so much outdoor sculpture seemed to do. Inspired by hedges and their half-natural, half-husbanded forms, he was looking for a way of actively collaborating with nature.

  From long familiarity with the local hedges, often drawing or photographing the sinuous forms of the laid trees, Nash knew that ash was the most resilient to constant shaping, would lean furthest from its roots and naturally grow into sinuous, idiosyncratic forms. Nash likens the way he is guiding the trees to the way the ancient Chinese potters kept their minds on the invisible volume of space inside the pot and worked up the clay around its shape. He was also attracted by the gradual, long-term nature of the project: its long reach forward and its continuity.

  His first ring of saplings was eaten by sheep, so he put up a fence and planted another. He also put in birches as a windbreak, and to stimulate the ashes to compete with them in growth. Then he began to apply some of the techniques of the hedger, pruning and shaping the trees as they grew, grafting on side shoots, working on the shape every winter, up ladders and even a wooden scaffold as the dome grew taller. At one stage an elaborate system of guy ropes and tent pegs urged the lead growth of the Ash Dome towards the centre. He shows me how, in 1983, he made the first bends in the trunks, leaning the trees anticlockwise by making a series of saw cuts nearly all the way through the growing trunk on the insides of the bends to allow for compression, binding the wounds with damp cloth under plastic until the cambium layer had healed, guiding and supporting the trees on stakes. Thus he has kinked the trees several times over the years into their wild and graceful dance on the hillside.

  As in any collaboration, the trees have their own ideas, and Nash must continually work his hedgerow skills to influence them as the sculptor, or choreographer. He admires and enjoys the sense of purpose in each tree, its stroppiness. Again it is a question of resistance, of arm-wrestling the muscular trees. ‘The tree has a purpose, and it will always keep trying to fulfil its purpose whatever happens,’ says Nash. I notice that at each place where an ash has been bent or cut it has grown stronger, swelling into a callous like a human knee or puckering into a bump of scar tissue round the little star-cracked crater of each amputated branch. Every one of these details represents a decision, a little setback for the tree to which it responds with redoubled vigour that is certainly defiance and might even be anger, but only adds to the dramatic sense of muscularity and movement in the whole. But Nash has no desire for rigid control: it is the unpredictability of growth that interests him, and he has charted the life of this sculpture by drawing it over and over again, from year to year, through the seasons, even setting up a drawing table on the spot. His drawings of the Ash Dome are, he says, ‘its fruit’. This is by no means a figure of speech. Sculptors have to make a living just like the rest of us, and the next morning I help Nash to carry a harvest of a dozen or so ash-framed drawings of Ash Dome out of his drawing studio to be packed and sent off to a gallery.

  In its rootedness, the Dome expresses Nash’s commitment to a settled life in one place, and a deep rapport with the landscape in which he lives. In hedgerows, sheep will often bite off leading shoots of trees and shape them with their browsing, or branches will fuse together through close contact. As linear woods, hedges have a naturally sculptural quality that is reflected in the dome of ash. But the space enclosed by the trees also suggests to Nash the great hidden, hollowed dome of the slate mine inside Manod Mawr, one of the mountains across the valley. All the leaning trees are Ubus of a kind. The curious swaying, zigzagging habit of the trees in Ash Dome is like the tentative, tangential progress of a hare down a lane, reminiscent of Ted Hughes’s line in ‘The Warm and the Cold’: ‘The hare strays down the highway like a root going deeper.’

  There is a strong sense of the serious business of play about working with trees like this. You bend them down, they spring back. You cut them down, they spring back again. You lay them down and they send new shoots growing straight up. It is worth noting that Nash dedicated one of his books to his brother Chris, ‘who took playing seriously and let me join in’. A short walk away across the hillside we encounter Sabre Growth Larches swirling elaborately upwards like Isadora Duncan, and the striking Celtic Hedge, a deliberately contrary version of a sixty-foot sycamore hedge, planted in 1989. Nash fused the branches of this wild trellis by peeling off the bark to expose the living cambium layer at the point of contact, then drilling and screwing them tightly together, removing the screw once the wooden joint had grown and the trees were one: a streamlined version of the way a scion would traditionally be bound and grafted on to the rootstock of an orchard fruit tree.

  Higher up on the hillside, with a tall grove and a holly bush at its back, Nash has constructed a shelter like a coracle, a hazel bender sprung on a foundation cruck frame of a bow of oak made from a single limb sawn lengthwise in four, with a matt-black canvas skin stretched over the woven wood, a small stove and an ingenious beak-like chimney, like the spout of a jug. It is open fronted, like the Aboriginal shells of the Sydney Opera House, rimmed inside with a curved wooden bench that looks over the woods and valley. We sit and talk of beavers and their natural sculptures of chewed cottonwood stumps outside Chicago, and the rhomboid of seven rows of seven white Himalayan birches Nash planted seven feet apart just down the hill, hoping they would grow precisely forty-nine feet high. Looking at them, I realize it was probably David Nash who quietly influenced the planting of the elegant, close-set miniature forest of birches that grows outside the Tate Modern.

  From Cae’n-y-Coed we drive down the Ffestiniog Valley to a lane beside the Dwyryd River and a small bridge over a tributary stream. Sheep pause in their grazing and watch us go by, chewing in their nervous way. One of the features of the Welsh countryside David Nash appreciates and enjoys is what he calls ‘sheep spaces’: the hollows the animals wear and harden into the ground in their own image over generations. Such unassuming shelters are often among the roots of trees, which the sheep polish and impregnate with the lanolin of their fleeces. Nash has often drawn them in charcoal or pastel, and even created them in situ, gratis for the sheep, carving out containing walls of wood. They are signs of settling, of the intimate, long-term connection with the earth that is Nash’s own way of life too. In that sense they are of a piece with Ash Dome, which is also a containing, protective form, now well rooted at Cae’n-y-Coed, with similar squatters’ rights.

  If Ash Dome is abo
ut putting down roots, Wooden Boulder is an equally radical work about letting go. It is adventurous in every sense, a great gesture of liberation in which Nash has surrendered his work to nature and the elements and set no limits. In the summer of 1978, he heard of a great oak that had recently been felled directly uphill from where we were now standing by the stream, and that was available to him. Its owners had feared it might fall on their cottage. Working the tree where it lay over a two-year period, Nash carved a dozen or more sculptures from it. The first of these, a giant oak ball three feet in diameter, was originally intended to go into the studio and dry out. When the moment came to sever the half-carved sphere from the main trunk and roll it to continue carving the underneath, Nash had the idea of using the nearby stream and water slide to carry the half-ton sphere down to a pool below, then haul it on to a track where it could be rolled along to the road and trundled off to the studio. This is what would have happened, except that the wooden ball jammed itself halfway down the water slide and wouldn’t budge. At first it looked like a problem until, thinking it over in a Zen frame of mind, Nash realized it was an opportunity, a happy accident that would transform the work by enabling him to release it back into nature: to shed it like a leaf. He would let it go its own way and be a rock in a stream, with water playing about it, freezing to it, papering it with autumn leaves. From that moment on, it became Wooden Boulder, a new kind of work with its own independent life, its own story and the sculptor as its biographer.