by Roger Deakin
By the following year, the deciduous sculpture had shifted position during the winter spate and settled into the pool beneath the waterfall. Nash had already begun recording its progress in photographs and drawings, and helped it, like a scarab beetle, into the shallows to be washed down into another waterfall and the next pool in August 1980. Here it stayed for the next eight years, darkening by the action of the water into the colour of the other stones in the stream. The boulder had taken on an independent life of its own, and Nash drew and photographed its changing moods and fortunes through frosty or snowy days, engulfed in raging foam during storms, or jammed with leaves and sticks. It shifted downstream three more times, until, following a massive storm in 1994, it hid itself completely, wedged under a bridge. A scarab once again, it was winched out by Nash and rolled back into the stream the other side, where it sat on the stony bed under some trees close to the confluence with the River Dwyryd for eight years until November 2002, when a strong enough flood eventually carried it into the main river. It travelled three miles towards the sea on the tides and beached itself on a sandbank in the estuary.
In the new setting of wide horizons and reflected sky, the sculpture stood out heroically and, like a Celtic saint, began to wander the waters of the estuary, mysteriously disappearing up creeks, endlessly doubling back on itself in the ebb and flow, moving with each new tide, responding to the moon. By now utterly obsessed, Nash went searching for it in a boat and lost it altogether for a while. ‘Capricious’ is how he describes its behaviour. He even put out ‘Wanted’ posters around the estuary. During those chilly winter days of hide-and-seek he studied the tides and pored over charts, mapping the uncertain voyage. Then one January day the great oak apple reappeared on a saltmarsh and seemed almost settled for a moment until the Equinox tide of 19 March 2003 floated it free. Nash watched from a boat, and, as the heavy sphere floated ‘like a seal’, most of its body submerged, rolling slightly as it rode the tide, bumping the bottom, its rough-carved angles smoothed and rounded by so much passage over stone or sand. He had charted its progress whenever he could with his camera as well as on paper. It was just a far-off dot when he last saw it on 30 March. Somebody sighted Wooden Boulder floating close to the estuary’s mouth a few days later, but it vanished in April 2003. The ‘Wanted’ posters went up again, to no avail. Nash is still sceptical about the idea that the sculpture is out there in the Irish Sea, perhaps even gone for ever, a message in a bottle. He keeps on searching the beaches and creeks of the estuary, quartering it endlessly on board a boat, as he did before. In contrast to Ash Dome, which Nash describes as a ‘coming’, or ‘becoming’ sculpture, Wooden Boulder is a ‘going’ sculpture.
The very notion of a wooden boulder is a metaphysical conceit, just as the first stone pillar was in ancient Greece. Until the original Doric column was conceived and built, all temple pillars had been trees, and the fluted stone, with its foliate embellishment below the roof, audaciously mimicked them. Like Dylan Thomas’s ‘Dogs in the wetnosed yards’ in Under Milk Wood, it surprises and delights by fusing two hitherto separate elements. In one of his early notebooks, Gerard Manley Hopkins makes a sketch of a lasher, a steep, fast-flowing overflow channel on the canal at Wolvercote near Oxford, and describes the racing water as ‘running like a wind’. The sudden translation of water into a different element is, again, striking and extraordinary.
We stand on the bridge over the stream where the boulder jammed itself, looking out downriver towards the estuary beyond as Nash tells its story. It is low tide, otherwise we might be out in the boat. I have the impression that the searching will go on a long time, whatever the results: it has become part of the work, almost a habit. Claire said later, ‘I have never seen a man so happy as when David was out in the boat sighting the boulder far out in the estuary.’ We go back in the car and follow the old droving road past the house where Inigo Jones was born, crossing the Dwyryd by the lovely triple-arched stone bridge he built, with seats of slate set in the triangular pedestrian refuges where people sit and watch the oak-fringed river on summer evenings. Along the way, we have to run the gauntlet of a farmyard where two sheepdogs savage the car, as Nash predicted they would, biting at the bumpers as we wind up the windows. He and his brother used to walk this lane as boys, and always hid a pair of stout sticks in the wall to seize as they approached the farm, for beating off the dogs.
I sense that perhaps Wooden Boulder has become an alter ego for Nash: its unfolding story part of his life, the restless thing itself an embodiment of his soul. Something about it reminds me of the Irish story of Sweeney Astray as told by Seamus Heaney. Sweeney, a poet king, is exiled, naked, into the wild, turned into a bird, flies about Ireland, lives in trees and roosts in the ivy, eating watercress and drinking from the rivers. There is a mythic feel to the story of Wooden Boulder. An artist turns a tree into a boulder, which miraculously floats and swims its way over many years towards the sea, where it rolls over like a seal and seems to disappear. The work is close in spirit to the journeys of Richard Long: Nash entering and exploring the landscape, and experiencing the raw life of ‘the elements’, in particular the element of water, through the medium of the wandering oak ball. Nash himself is an artist deeply rooted in his own place but also an adventurer, like many other sculptors, who loves to travel to work in new landscapes with new materials: California redwood or madrone, Tasmanian eucalypts or palm trees in Barcelona. He points out appreciatively the wavy compression grain in one of his redwood sculptures from California, the sheer weight of the tree buckling the wood lower in the trunk and stippling its grain. Trees and wood vary greatly across the world, even within the same genus or even species. Birch is little regarded in Britain except as a useful nurse tree to shelter and encourage saplings, and its wood is almost ignored. Yet in Finland or Japan the tree is revered and its wood highly valued. Birch is a different wood in different parts of the world. When Nash first put his chainsaw into it in Japan, he thought there was something wrong, that the saw needed sharpening, but it was only that the wood was slower grown, therefore much harder than in Britain. The elements themselves, Nash finds, are different wherever he travels. The air may be sharper or more humid. In Australia the sky is more penetrating, more extreme a thing than here. In Japan the water behaves quite differently: it is brighter, more vigorous, even boisterous, and it is more solid. The waves are different too. On a lake in Hokkaido, Nash saw waves slapping against each other just as they do in Hokusai prints, running at each other, colliding head on and spouting upwards like trees. Waves, he says, never do that here.
Over dinner, Nash describes the pleasure of his first visit to Japan, and the island of Hokkaido. Because of the scale and nature of his work, he always needs assistants, whom he recruits locally. He describes the special pleasure of getting to know people by working alongside them in their own place. It is the best kind of introduction, he finds, to people and place, and through it he soon finds his way to the idea: the right thing to make in that particular place. In Barcelona he explained to the gallery his need for whole trees and his reluctance to cut any down, and so was led to the city’s tree hospital, where sick and ailing trees, uprooted by gentle diggers, are taken in tree ambulances to be nursed back to health in huge trenches of fresh earth. About forty per cent of them recover, but among those that had succumbed, Nash found palms and Australian pines, neither of which he had ever carved before. He resurrected them as sculpture and created his show of columns after the manner of Gaudí.
Next morning, in the covered carving shed at Llwingell, down the road from the chapel where Nash has expanded to accommodate the heavy-duty tools and materials of his trade, his assistant Roland is at work with a gas blowtorch, carefully charring a new work carved from yew. All around him, the whole trunks of hardwood trees lie or are stood up in the shed or outside in the yard. Nash has good practical reasons for charring wood in some of his sculptures. Blackening the edges, for example, will make the shape stand out more clearly, e
specially against the white walls of a gallery. Crazed, black-charred wood surfaces absorb light and seem to alter the sense of the size of a sculpture so it feels further away, although Nash isn’t sure whether it makes it bigger or smaller. He says that when he sees a sculpture made of wood, the first thing he sees is the wood, and then he sees the form. But Nash’s fundamental instinct to apply fire seems to arise from somewhere deeper: an underlying awareness of time and the elements that consistently informs his imagination. Talking to Nash about why he chars wood only confirms what a metaphysical artist he is. Like the drenching and immersion of Wooden Boulder in water, one of the four elements that sustain the lives of trees, charring drenches the wood in fire, symbolic of the warmth and light of the sun. As the ancient Chinese fifth element, wood is an amalgam of earth, air, fire, in the form of sunlight, and water. Fire alters the fundamental nature of the surface of wood from vegetable to mineral to become carbon. This brings it a step closer to stone. Charring, says Nash, erases the almost human intricacies of the grain, which suggest the tree’s life story and a lifespan not so different from our own. Charring his sculptures, he feels, enables him to transcend the finite timescale of living wood and alter the sense of time in the viewer.
Like Brancusi, Nash is always acutely aware of the importance of the setting and presentation of his work in a gallery or outside space. By setting the charred Pyramid, Sphere and Cube he made in elm in Japan in 1993 against a white wall with two-dimensional charcoal images taken directly from the sculptures framed on white as a background, Nash deliberately enhanced its dramatic impact. He had done something similar in 1987, in Nature to Nature. He also raised interesting questions about our different ways of seeing two- and three-dimensional images. We read the size of three-dimensional images in relation to our own body scale, Nash thinks, and we experience them far more physically. A two-dimensional image is read more purely by the imagination. Juxtaposing both kinds of representation sets up interesting tensions that enhance both images. Nash believes yet another level of internal struggle arises between the visual and tactile apprehension of his charred sculptures. The eye is drawn imaginatively towards the blackness of carbon, but emotionally the sense of touch knows carbon sets your teeth on edge, and distances it.
Nash will often char a sculpture such as his tall, spoon-shaped Throne by encasing it in a sleeve of scrap wood and setting fire to it. Just as in the use of the chainsaw to carve, there is a sense of drama and controlled power to the pyre. There is also more than a hint of ritual, of cremation: even the idea that the work might be sacrificed as an offering to the woodland deities. When in 1990 I first saw the famous image of the charring of the base of Comet Ball by means of a small kindling-wood fire beneath it, my first thought was that the event itself dramatized the fiery comet crashing to earth. Charring also has a wonderful way of black-holing the containing interior of some of the hollowed cylinders, like Charred Column, reminiscent of the way lightning so often strikes ancient trees and burns out their hollows. This happens to gum trees in Australia, and Nash was inspired by the dramatic sight of such burnt-out cases, often standing starkly alone in the midst of open country in Tasmania. In a lightning strike, according to Nash, the tree is cooked at 15,000°C. The sap boils instantly and explodes. The splintered tree-shrapnel can be devastating.
I ask Nash about his other use of charcoal in so much of his two-dimensional work on paper. What wood, I wonder, makes the best charcoal for drawing? Willow is his favourite. It has long fibres, which hold together even when charcoaled, and it has a softness he likes. He has tried drawing with all sorts of charcoaled woods. Oak is too scratchy, but alder can be good. For a dense black, Nash uses compressed charcoal, which has first been powdered and then reconstituted.
Inside one of the workshops across the yard a nest of chainsaws lines up neatly in pairs; these range in size from 21-inch blades to nearly three feet. They are all red Stihls. Nash sometimes even borrows a four-footer from a friend in Sussex, where his favourite English oaks come from. I have a chainsaw myself, and mention the fear as well as the awe it stirs in me whenever I start it up. Does Nash feel the same? He admits to a healthy modicum of fear informing his respect for these machines. Owning a pit-bull terrier must feel much the same. Keeping the saws sharp is an art in itself. Nash and Roland spend a lot of time lovingly filing the dozens of little curved teeth on each chain by hand. Trees and big timbers often present technical problems. Working in the Bialowieza Forest in north-eastern Poland, Nash discovered that many of the trees contained shrapnel from the war, disastrous to chainsaws. He had recently taken delivery of twenty massive oak trees, chosen from 300 used as sea defences at Eastbourne and renewed by the town council. They had withstood, he calculated, 18,000 tides over twenty-five years, but were so ingrained with sand that it was impossible to use a chainsaw on them without instantly blunting it. He turned them into charred columns instead. Nash loves these life histories of wood and trees, and speaks of the timber that comes from standard lots in a sawmill as ‘dumb’, because it holds no stories.
One particular tree history with a strong appeal to Nash’s keen nose for signs of human collaboration with nature is embodied in the Powis Castle yew trees. Many of the trees date back 300 years, and they made a deep impression on him when he first saw them. They are huge, up to forty feet high, and their apparently random free-flowing shapes have led to the local name twmps, an abbreviation of the welsh twmpath, meaning a ‘mound’ or ‘pile’ with an Anglicized plural tacked on. The yews have grown into their outlandish shapes because for fifty years or so from about 1800 they were neglected and left uncut. Then, when cutting resumed, the gardeners were enlightened enough simply to follow the surreal organic forms that had mushroomed around the castle gardens, climbing 52-foot wooden ladders and cutting the yews single-handed with slashers, for fear of letting go of the rungs at such a height to use shears. By Nash’s reckoning, the trees have outlived twelve generations of gardeners, whose human intervention has created sculptural forms quite different from the natural yews of the same age that grow in the lower part of Powis Garden. Characteristically, it is the touch of humour these ‘great comic beasts’ bring to the garden that Nash enjoys. He sees them as dark green clouds, floating about the garden, enveloping the stone walls. In his charcoal-and-pastel drawings of the twmps, Nash has explored the interplay between their black, skeletal interiors and the intricacy of the lacework of twigs and growing tips that create the green undulating exterior. The heart of darkness inside the yew is irresistible to Nash, and in his dreamlike drawings of the twmps they seem to loom greenly out of a charcoal mist.
Nash has often challenged the idea that trees are anything but moving things by giving them legs, sometimes literally so. The idea is there in all the living, dancing trees on the hillside at Cae’n-y-Coed, in Running Table and all the sculptures where the tree is upturned and the branches become gangling legs. Nash’s very first sculpture at the age of four was a bundle of Virginia creeper stalks bound together and stood up, bent out like legs. Fortunately, it was praised by the family’s two artist neighbours when he took it next door for them to see. The ‘Birnam Wood effect’ is there too in the ‘wheelies’ Nash once sold for three pounds each at an early show at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, natural shapes of wood wheeled at the heavy end so you could wheelbarrow them about. People still own these small sculptures, which actually dare suggest that you might play with them.
As with Ash Dome, such a collaboration between humans and nature as created the twmps over 300 years is, for Nash, a potent symbol of a much wider ideal for our relations with nature, involving work and love. His sculpture has resurrected fallen trees into meaning as well as beauty. Describing the strength and assurance of the work of one of his mentors, the sculptor David Smith, Nash once said ‘he speaks metal.’ Nash has discovered an equivalent language of wood. He speaks of ‘the fact of sculpture’, which, like theatre, lives in the same three dimensions as we do.
The
idea that Nash is engaged in a lifelong act of faith in the face of a poor prognosis for nature is irresistible when, surrounded by the assembled ‘congregation’ in the Capel Rhiw, you look up to the inscription still there in Welsh above the central east window: Sancteiddrwydd a weddai i’th dŷ (‘Holiness becometh thine house’). With characteristic modesty, Nash puts it another way, speaking wood: ‘A dormant faith is revived in the new growth on old wood.’
East Anglian Coast
Just where the Peddars Way may be said to begin is an interesting question. You can pick up its beginnings on Bridgham Heath just to the north of the Thet where the river flows west from East Harling through Bridgham into a land of twisted Scots pines and sandy woods full of pingoes like the bunkers of long-deserted golf links. Then it heads off more or less north through the Brecks, past Wretham and Blackrabbit Warren, until it seems to fizzle out a mile beyond a little wood called Shaker’s Furze among a cluster of tumuli on Sparrow Hill, only to pick up its thread after miles of dull arable fields in a broken line running past Swaffham to the west. Like the intermittent conversations people have on long walks, it comes and goes across Norfolk, past the busy Catholic shrine at Walsingham, all the way to the edge of the known world at Holme-next-the-Sea.
It is barely dawn and high tide when Harry Cory Wright, Adam Nicolson and I set out from nearby Brancaster Staithe with John Brown, the Scolt Head Nature Warden, in his open wooden motor boat, heading up the channel through Brancaster Marshes towards Scolt Head and the open sea. We have intelligence that 50,000 pink-footed geese have arrived and are roosting on the island, and we are on our way to see them. The island’s shores are grey with the birds, and already they are taking off, rising in undulating tresses and ribbons, trailing like kite tails through the sky, skimming the water, or veeing high above the rising mist. We chug across the clear grey, perfectly calm water, sliding over sandbars as the sky fills with patterned skeins of geese. Their plaintive honking echoes across Brancaster Harbour as they head inland towards their feeding grounds on stubble fields. Someone mentions that a circle of ancient wood has begun to emerge in a very slow-motion striptease out of the sands and peat banks on Holme beach below the high-water line. The braiding geese overhead might be pointing towards it as they fly off in their chevrons to their grazing fields. John knows the hows and whys of these snaking channels and marshes, and steers along them: the Gush, Whin Creek, Felters Bay. We steer between two sticks bearing pennants that hang limply in the fine drizzle, land on a sandbar, and follow a sandy path through the low scrub of sea lavender up to the warden’s oak-framed hut, originally built in 1928 for visiting naturalists.