Ash Dome

Here is a photo I took this morning of the David Nash: 45 Years of Drawing exhibition at London's Annely Juda gallery. This room is dedicated to Ash Dome, the living tree sculpture he planted in 1977. Over the years he has returned to tend the trees and make drawings, using charcoal, raw pigment and earth from the ground they circle. The drawing below shows how the trees were fletched over and grafted. In the catalogue he explains: 

I planted 22 ash saplings in a circle with the intention of forming a dome like space for the 21st century, a 30-year project. In 1981 I grafted on branches to take up the lead growth when the tree was fetched and 1983 I started fetching in an anti-clockwise direction around the circle. Over the years each tree has formed its own individual shape, all spiralling towards the centre. (This is achieved by pruning).

The exhibition has film footage showing Nash as a young man planting the saplings and as an older man seeing how they have evolved. In a 2016 post on this blog I described a BBC documentary about British land artists that included Ash Dome: 'David Nash tells James Fox that clips of him working on it over the years show the sculpture gradually growing while he just gets older (Fox tells us he wasn't even born when Nash planted the saplings in 1977).' Sadly this hasn't happened: Ash Dome was not destined to keep on growing.

In a 2019 interview with Martin Gayford, Nash mentions the arrival of ash dieback disease, although the sculpture was still being referred to as Ash Dome (1977–ongoing). Now it is called Ash Dome (1977-2019). The first drawing above is Ash Dome with ash dieback, the second Ash Dome with oaks. After some deliberation Nash decided to plant a new dome of 22 oak trees surrounding the dying ash trees, this time to be fetched in a clockwise direction. So there is hope here for a new 22nd century dome that will outlast us all. But it is a sad moment in the film (see below) when, earlier this year, Nash returns to his sculpture and picks up one of the original trees which lay broken on the ground. 

Drunkard's Rock

Bill Porter (who uses the pen name Red Pine) wrote a wonderful account of his travels in search of places associated with ancient Chinese poetry, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (2016). Arriving now at these historic sites could involve encountering coachloads of people at a vast newly-built tourist site or finding nothing at all, just assurances from elderly locals or descendants that an old poet had indeed once lived in the vicinity. To take just one day and four Tang Dynasty poets as an example: leaving Xi’an to visit Wang Wei’s famous estate, Red Pine discovered it is now being used to make nuclear warheads. He then asked his taxi driver to make for the village where Liu Zongyuan had lived, but was met there with shrugs. A shrine to Du Fu was easy to find but Du Mu’s grave in a nearby village was removed by officials in the seventies and is now a pit full of trash.

Given the dense literary history of Mount Lu (which I briefly covered in a 2010 post here) you might think Red Pine would have had no difficulty seeing everything associated with its famous poets. And in Chaisang (Mulberry-Bramble) he did find a grandiose memorial and museum devoted to Tao Yuanming (T'ao Yüan-ming, 365-427), founder of the fields-and-gardens tradition. But when he attempted to see the poet’s grave he was told it was off limits, located now inside a military base, and the soldiers on guard would not let him in. 

Tao Yuanming was born at Chaisang and returned to the area ‘to dwell in gardens and fields’, as his famous poem of retreat put it. However, as Burton Watson wrote in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, Tao’s poetry is ambiguous – ‘exclamations upon the beauties of nature and the freedom and peace of rustic life sit uneasily alongside confessions of loneliness, frustration, and fear, particularly of death. He sought solace in his zither, his books, and above all in wine, about half of his poems mentioning his fondness for “the thing in the cup,” though in one of the poems he wrote depicting his own funeral, he declares that he was never able to get enough of it.'

Tao Yuanming in a painting by Chen Hongshou (1598-1652)

Leaving Chaisang, Red Pine's taxi drove south past the giant Donglin Buddha, heading for Wenchuan village at the foot of Lushan. On a previous visit back in 1991 he discovered Tao Yuanming’s last lineal male descendant had still been living here until his death just a few weeks before Red Pine’s arrival. Returning now, twenty-five years later, he found the village had been bulldozed and replaced with hot spring hotels. But fortunately it was still possible to see Drunkard’s Rock, where Tao met his friends and was inspired to write his wonderful account of the Peach Blossom Spring. The great eighteenth century poet Yuan Mei (1716-97) came here in 1784 and reflected on the fact that a mere ‘scrubby piece of stone / has been cherished and admired for more than a thousand years.’ Red Pine showed his taxi driver the rock and the faded signature carved into it by Confucian scholar (Chu Hsi, 1130-1200). His taxi driver, amazed, wondered why it wasn't in a museum but Red Pine was glad it wasn't and 'given its size, I didn't think it was going anywhere anytime soon.'