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. 

The Gibberd Garden

We made a trip this week to see Sir Frederick Gibberd's garden, created between 1957 and 1984, and located just outside Harlow, the New Town for which he was chief architect.  Gibberd's best known design is probably Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral (aka 'Paddy's Wigwam'), a building I've always rather liked although Gibberd himself was sued for £1.3m over leaks and defects in the tiling (which have had to be replaced).  He was also involved in some key post-War industrial buildings - the original Heathrow Terminal buildings, the recently-demolished Didcot A Power Station - and a few of his garden's metal and concrete sculptures and salvaged objects have the look of once-futuristic constructions that have seen better days.  As a private collector Gibberd wouldn't have had resources to buy sculptures by world-renowned artists, although there is a piece by David Nash (see below).  Nor can the artworks compete with those made by practising artists like Barbara Hepworth and Ian Hamilton Finlay for their own gardens.  But Gibberd, as a planner and landscape architect, made good use of the site, turning the hillside and stream into a sequence of spaces with some sculptures set to catch the eye and others that you almost stumble upon.

There is an article about Gibberd by his grandson that praises the moated castle he built for his grandchildren in one corner of the site using recycled pieces of wood - my sons certainly enjoyed this too.  The garden feature we liked best was also recycled - two mossy Corinthian columns shaded by trees with real acanthus growing at their base to echo the stone foliage above.  This 'temple' fragment could almost have come from that erotic Renaissance idyll, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili; in fact the pillars were designed in 1831 by John Nash for a commercial building on The Strand in London, and salvaged by Gibberd when his firm redesigned it in the 1970s for Coutts Bank.  I am sure they are more appreciated in this garden among the trees than they would be on what is now the eighteenth most polluted street in Britain.

The garden must have been a pleasant place to relax in, but whether it was possible to enjoy it as a classical retreat or hortus conclusus I rather doubt.  I tried to record a chaffinch singing over the bright sound of water in the brook but by the time I had my phone out all you could hear was the slow rumble of an aeroplane flying overhead.  The embankment at the end of the garden carries a busy train line into Harlow.  Sculptures are largely absent from the adjacent arboretum, making all the more noticeable some overhead wires crossing the space above and a line of warning signs (see above) marking the presence of a gas pipeline under the grass.  You suspect though that Gibberd would not really have minded all these reminders that the garden is not separated off from the modern world he was so active in designing

Forest, Field & Sky

A programme about art in the landscape can currently be seen on the BBC iPlayer: Forest, Field & Sky: Art Out of Nature.  It is presented by Dr James Fox, who sets out his ambitions at the beginning of the programme: "I'll trek through forests and fields, around gorgeous gardens and to the very edges of our island and I'll gaze afresh at the skies above.  What I find will I hope change the way we think about the landscape and it might just change your view of modern art."  As this opening indicates, the programme was not written as a critical appraisal of British land art - it is more of an introduction for nature lovers who have a passing interest in art.  Nevertheless I found it an enjoyable hour's TV, well worth watching.

I'm afraid that what will remain most prominently in my memory is the moment (22 minutes in) when Andy Goldsworthy, having all but completed a stack of stones balanced laboriously against an old tree trunk, sees them overbalance and come crashing down.  There are no expletives, just a moment of sad resignation with bowed head, then a slow climb down his ladder.  After the broadcast, on Twitter, @doctorjamesfox revealed that this Sisyphean labour was in fact eventually completed, at the sixth attempt.  In addition to Goldsworthy the programme features four other famous names - David Nash, Richard Long, Charles Jencks and James Turrell - plus an artist whose work I had not seen before, Julie Brook.  In the early nineties she spent two years living in a cave on the island of Jura, abandoning painting in favour of making constructions called fire stacks.  Fox encounters her on a remote beach on the island of Lewis where she has been building one of these Goldsworthy-like circular structures at low tide, filling it with wood and seaweed to be set alight.  As the water rises and the sun goes down, the fire burns and the light of the flames flickers on the waves.

Ash Dome is a work of much longer duration.  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).  The programme then moves on to Richard Long, shown only in archive footage; Fox gamely retraces his 1968 ten-mile straight-line walk across Exmoor - tough going but a lot shorter than some of Long's subsequent walks.  After a digression on eighteenth century landscaping at Stourhead, which brought back pleasant memories of my visit there a couple of years ago, Fox is shown round Jencks's Garden of Cosmic Speculation.  Finally he visits Turrell's Deer Shelter Skyspace at Yorkshire Sculpture Park and sits inside, gazing up at the blue aperture of sky as it slowly darkens.  He says that art like this teaches us patience, although in the programme's speeded up footage, night encroaches in a matter seconds.  It is a reminder perhaps of the central message of the film: that this art is about experience that can only be found away from our screens, outside in the landscape.

A Natural Gallery

On Saturday, the only rain-free day so far this month, we headed across London to see David Nash At Kew: A Natural Gallery.  Looking now at the website I see it suggests capturing 'a lasting memory of your visit to the exhibition with one of our exclusive products. Each item in our very special collection reflects the spirit and ethos of David Nash.'  We failed to buy any of the Nash-inspired homeware, but I'm hoping instead to retain a lasting memory of our visit by uploading a few photographs here.  The sculptures on show were much as you would expect, some more striking than others, but the location for each was well chosen to echo or contrast with the surrounding trees and buildings.  In her review Laura Cumming thinks Nash suffers by comparison: 'a park filled with so many stunning variations on the essential tree form is bound to throw an emphasis on beauty (and variety) that is not always kind to this artist, whose work is so much the result of conspicuous labour.'  Ultimately, none of the sculptures were as interesting to me as the film of Wooden Boulder, which you can see along with Nash's drawings and photographs in Kew's Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art.  I have described here before this floating sculpture and its eventual disappearance in the sea, although I was writing prior to the boulder's brief rediscovery in 2009.  The film begins with grainy images of the boulder entering the river and ends with beautifully shot and recorded footage of it floating and resting along the estuary among the reeds and sandbanks.

The photograph above shows the Wood Quarry, where David Nash is making sculptures at Kew Gardens using old or diseased trees.  Kew's head of trees Tony Kirkham has taken comfort from seeing a victim of "acute oak decline" gradually transformed by Nash into an artwork.  'The neighbouring tree was also poorly, but has recovered dramatically. "Saying to it 'Buck up or there's a man coming for you with a chainsaw' seems to have worked," Kirkham said.'  As artist in residence, Nash has welcomed the chance to reveal to visitors how he goes about his work as a sculptor.  'I’ve often felt that in the shows I’ve done before, much of the process is hidden. What’s unique about Kew is to make the process part of the exhibition.’  Unfortunately there was no sign of him last Saturday, but you can see him working among the upended trees in the video clip below.  I would like to have seen how he interacts with members of the public (in a recent post I mentioned the group walk Hamish Fulton organised to accompany his Margate exhibition - no talking allowed...)  It is quite hard to imagine Nash chatting with bystanders, but I imagine many would in any case be shy of striking up conversation with someone wearing ear protectors and wielding a chainsaw.  

Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles

Two photographs in magazines I’ve been reading this month caught my eye.  The first, from Tate etc. (Summer 2011) is Magritte’s Les Idées Claires (1955), an image chosen by Jeff Koons (who likens the boulder floating over the sea to one of his basketballs in water).  The second, from The Wire (May 2011) is Herbert Distel’s Projekt Canaris (1970), showing a three metre long polyester egg which the artist launched from the coast of West Africa.  A similar piece is referred to in David Clarke’s recent book Water and Art – in Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles (2000) Zhan Wang set one of his stainless steel rocks adrift at sea near Lingshan Island.   And I have written here before about David Nash’s Wooden Boulder, which began as a sculpture in the landscape but after describing the course of a river ended up as another of these art boulders, set free on the sea.  As far as I know the current location of Wooden Boulder remains a mystery.  Distel’s egg  was driven by trade winds across the Atlantic and reached Trinidad seven months later.

I wonder why there hasn’t been more ‘sea art’, floating equivalents to the famous land art projects of the American West?  Tacita Dean may have had trouble ‘Trying to Find Spiral Jetty’ (1997) but tracking down a sculpture in an ocean could have been even more interesting.  Herbert Distel sought help from the Cuban authorities in locating his egg after it sailed beyond the Canary Islands and was thought to be heading into the Caribbean.  It was eventually spotted by the captain of a Dutch ship who sent a telegram: ‘Egg seen on 6 December 1970 gmt 17.50, about 100 km east off the island of Trinidad.’ Of course I’m not really advocating that we litter the sea with permanent floating art works.  Instead sea artists might take inspiration from Buster Simpson, who has an ongoing project to drop disks of limestone into the Hudson River: rocks that will gradually dissolve and counteract the effects of acid rain.

Paddle to the Sea

I have written here before about David Nash's Wooden Boulder which took twenty-five years to be carried from a Welsh river to the open sea.  Nash documented its slow progress through the landscape, but has now lost sight of it.  "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.”

I've just been watching with my three year old son the short film, Paddle to the Sea, made in 1966 by Bill Mason. It follows the journey of a small wooden canoe, carved by a lonely boy in the woods of west Ontario, as it is carried by currents through lakes and rivers until eventually being found at the sea by a lighthouse keeper.  He releases it back into the Atlantic Ocean where, like Nash's boulder, its ultimate destination is unknown.

How different they are - a huge wooden boulder that Nash was unable to transport, slowly pushed to the sea when the currents are powerful enough to move it, and a light model canoe floating at the mercy of the elements.  One makes its way down to the Atlantic through the river Dwyry, the other is carried across twenty-two thousand miles of the vast Canadian landscape.  Paddle to the Sea was immediately lost to its creator, whilst the Wooden Boulder became a constant presence for Nash over a period of twenty five years.  Nash's work was accidental and its narrative unfolded by chance, whilst Mason's film is fictional, based on an original picture book by Holling C. Holling, published in 1941.

On the Criterion site Michael Koresky gives a good description of the film and describes the efforts Mason went to, taking 'the exact route through the Great Lakes and down the Saint Lawrence River illustrated in the book—both a visualization of Holling’s work and a pilgrimage. ...  The most dangerous part of the shoot was, unsurprisingly, at Niagara Falls, where Mason dropped his 16 mm camera, secured by a line anchored to a telephone pole, eighty feet down the fierce waterfall.  The filmmaking adventures notwithstanding, Paddle to the Sea is perhaps more remarkable for the patience and contemplative silences of its storytelling, beautifully typified in the placid exterior of its impervious main character. Though it’s never fully anthropomorphized by the film’s narration, the piece of wood becomes a character in its own right. Even when threatened by curious wildlife, including sea snakes, gulls, and frogs, or the looming machinery and pollution of mankind, Paddle simply smiles, an oasis of serenity amid nature’s unstoppable, alternately merciless and merciful, flow. In one of Mason’s most extraordinary moments, the tiny carved figure floats, still and upright as ever, silhouetted against a sky of blooming Fourth of July fireworks in Detroit harbor; he’s either oblivious to these odd, man-made pleasures or watching intently with alien awe, but the narrator refuses to impose a reading.'

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.”