Starr Review, New Edition: DAVID NASH: 200 SEASONS. Trees and Land Art

The Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, Sussex

The Towner Gallery in Eastbourne on the English Channel presented a retrospective of the sculptor and land artist, David Nash, in the fall of 2019. I was lucky to be visiting the Towner at the time, on the trail of Eric Ravilious, of whose work they have a substantial collection. Ravilious turned out to be the least of it, though, because I was drawn into the vast David Nash: 200 Seasons. This retrospective epitomized the range of his work, where any single series— small sculptures, towering sculptures, plans, drawings, and photographs of works out of doors— could have filled the galleries brilliantly by itself.

Gallery view, David Nash: 200 Seasons

I knew nothing of Nash when I went in, and I was dazzled by his exquisitely undazzling sculpture. Nash's medium is trees—whole trees, which he uses in toto, and which, once deployed in parts as sculptures, uncannily remain trees. To see Nash-worked wood in the gallery was disconcerting, like encountering wild animals in human habitations. The difference, though, is that the wood still seems comfortable, as if it's essential state has not been brutalized, but opened up. We see wood as we have never been able to before, up close, more intimately. "No trees were harmed" in its transformations.

David Nash, two of Nine Cracked Balls, ca. 12" diameter

Nash's handling of wood is rough and patient. His favored forms are spheres, cubes, and pyramids, but he is most interested in what the wood itself suggests by its nature. He must work slowly in the sense that once he's committed rough whacks of his cutting instrument (axe, saw, chisel), he is willing to wait to see what happens next. Wood will dry and split. Rain will split it or warp it. In time, its color will change. I wondered, as I toured the show, if any of this work is ever "finished," or if that is a term that makes much of a difference. When is a tree finished? Hacked down, uprooted, even burned, its wood lives on, as Nash's lively work so eloquently testifies.

David Nash, small work

David Nash, small work, wood piece with multiple
slices left to dry.

I am writing now about the small works in this show, which demonstrate many of Nash's common sculptural techniques and apparent attitudes toward working with his material. His work is, I think, very thoughtful, but his ideas are developed long before the moments of execution. What seems to happen when he acts with the wood is direct, rough, and quick. By the time he makes a piece, he has come to know the type of wood, its properties, the effects of his tools, and imagines some of the possibilities of the environment on the future of his work. It also appears that he does not throw out "mistakes," since he is devoted to using every piece of a tree. This suggests that pieces of wood are like the organs of a body and can't be disposed of thoughtlessly.

David Nash, Twig Chair. A represen-
tative work with a wry twist.

These small pieces strike me as studies and showpieces equally. They are visually striking: dynamic, full of personality and energy that seem to have been released by the minimal shaping. As with Nash's monoliths, sometimes there is a suggestion of symbolic connection, but it is incidental. Unless his work is plainly representative, I don't see that the artist tells us anything, despite his work's being receptive to viewers' imaginations. It draws attention to wood and all wood can make us feel, which, as it turns out, is quite a lot.

The dome, a round gathering, is a suggestive form that Nash explores over and over. These were displayed on the gallery floors, and I found them exceedingly beautiful, especially because the materials distinguished each. They are made of individual components of varying heights assembled in roughly concentric rings on the floor. Each piece is rough-hewn, in itself a unique small sculpture with its own personality. The domes can feel sacral, archaeological, comical, or entirely like beautiful, gathered wood, filled with the artistic thought of its assembly.

David Nash, Cork Dome

While the concept was the same, and the means were similar in each dome, and the different wood itself was star of each. Each had its own color, texture, and cut marks. Each component was an individual that called for the viewer to particularize it as well as to comprehend the whole of the dome.

David Nash, interior of hardwood dome.

Many of the magnificent works in this show were beyond the ken of my camera, shown in Nash's beautiful, fluent memorial drawings. Nash is not merely a sculptor of wood, but he is best known as a land artist. His most innovative works are time-based conceptual pieces wrought on the English countryside. His tools and methods are those of the arborist in works like the Ash Dome, in which he planted a circle of ash trees that he pruned, grafted, and fletched for many years, training them to bend together so they formed a circle with the aspect almost of Matisse dancers in a ring. His Seven by Seven was a grid of Himalayan birch trees that he nurtured, each year trimming off new branches and washing to clean off peeling bark and green fungus. (These and other land works are documented in process in an excellent film by the Royal Academy on Nash's Academy homepage.) His works are not singular productions or statements like Christo's, but gradual, time-saturated processes that mark not only the changes in the land, but in the aging artist himself as his works continue in process for ten or twenty years.

David Nash. Drawing of several land projects.

Several of Nash's monumental sculptures fashioned from whole trees were included in the show. These are yet another distinctive branch of Nash's vast and deeply unified work. I found each tree almost overwhelming in its power and beauty, but I spent little time with them. They appeared stranded in an alien environment, ungrounded on the material of the gallery floor, like elephants on concrete. I would love to see them out of doors, though I do not know Nash's thoughts about ideal sitings.

Nash, Two Ubus with The Useful Pig on the floor beyond.

Retrospectives not only celebrate the many years of a major artist's career, but they are primers for those of us new to his work. This is how David Nash: 200 Seasons worked for me. The catalogue, named for the show, takes the viewer much deeper than the show can go, into Nash's studio in Wales, Capel Rhiw, into his processes, the importance of locations, and his ideas and observations about particular works. It also has magnificent pictures. Most of all, it demonstrates even more clearly than the show already did how close it is possible for artist and medium to grow.