Wooden boulder

There is an interview with David Nash in Sculpture Magazine where he says “I think Andy Goldsworthy and I, and Richard Long, and most of the British artists’ collectives associated with Land art would have been landscape painters a hundred years ago. But we don’t want to make portraits of the landscape. A landscape picture is a portrait. We don’t want that. We want to be in the land.”

From a landscape perspective, one of Nash’s most interesting works is Wooden Boulder. This 25 year project is the subject of a documentary film, Boulder, by Pete Telfe, and various photographs and drawings by Nash. It began in 1978 when Nash was asked to fell an oak tree, for safety reasons, that overhung a cottage at Bronturnor, North Wales. Nash cut part of the tree into a large wooden ‘boulder’ with the aim of taking it back to his studio as a wood ‘quarry’. However, he decided instead to push it into the nearby stream, where it became wedged between rocks beneath a waterfall. This, Nash felt, was the right place for it. However, the wooden boulder’s journey had only just begun and in March 1979 it was washed into the pool beneath the waterfall. Nash then decided to give it a helping hand, pushing it over the next waterfall to another pool, where it rested eight years, taking on the appearance of a real boulder. What had originally been intended as the source of a sculpture had become a work of environmental art. The boulder remained in the stream whilst the landscape changed around it, but it continued to move intermittently when the river swelled.

By 1994, Wooden Boulder was resting below the road bridge just before the stream meets the river Dwyryd. David Nash has described the subsequent course of the boulder (see the Annely Juda Fine Art site): “I did not expect it to move into the Dwyryd river in my lifetime. Then in November 2002 it was gone. The ‘goneness’ was palpable. The storm propelled the boulder 5 kilometres, stopping on a sandbank in the Dwyryd estuary. Now tidal, it became very mobile…. The wooden boulder was last seen in June 2003 on a sandbank near Ynys Giftan. All creeks and marshes have been searched so it can only be assumed it has made its way to the sea. It is not lost. It is wherever it is.”