David Nash

David Nash is known for works in wood and shaping living trees. His large wood sculptures are sometimes carved or partially burned to produce blackening. His main tools for these sculptures are chainsaw and an axe to carve the wood and a blowtorch to char the wood.
He also makes land art, of which the best known is Wooden Boulder, begun in 1978. This work involves a journey of large wooden sphere from a Welsh mountainside to the Atlantic Ocean. Wooden Boulder is a large wooden sphere carved by Nash in the North Wales landscape and left there to weather. Over the years the boulder has slipped, rolled and sometime been pushed through the landscape following the course of streams and rivers until finally it was last seen in the estuary of the river Dwyryd. Since then, it probably washed out to the Irish Sea, the sculptor has no idea of its location, and enjoys the notion that wood which grew out of the land will finally return to it.
Nash also makes sculptures which stay in the landscape. For example, Ash Dome is a ring of ash trees he planted in 1977 and was trained to form a domed shape. It's sited at a secret location somewhere in Snowdonia and whenever it's filmed. Crews are taken there by a circuitous route to guard its security.
In the late 1980s Nash worked at the Djerassi resident artist program, near Woodside, California, where he used Redwood and Madrone wood for his sculptures. Nash has worked with schools, university groups, and teachers throughout his career. He has created a varied body of work in which the relationship between man and nature is a central theme. His artistic ethos has been one of direct, physical involvement with his chosen material - wood - and the landscape.
Since 1967 his sculpture has formed two distinctive groupings; sculptures which connect with the outside, the landscape of making and placements, and works which are presented inside, within and in relation to, architectural environments. The inorganic, non-allusive sculptures that Nash makes using unseasoned wood are based on the universal geometry of the cube, the sphere and the pyramid. He uses the directions of mark-making to his favoured forms vertical for the cube, horizontal for the sphere, and diagonal for the pyramid. Although the innate character of the material is taken into account, and allowed to affect the outcome, he never allows it to dictate the sculpture's final identity. Nash even uses burners to char the wood, once again transforming the material through blackening.
Nash took a different approach to carving. Rather than chisels and abrasives, he uses chain saws and a blowtorch. As his show of recent work at Haines proves once again, he has dexterity with a chain saw that nearly defies belief. In "Downpour", he has cut roughly parallel diagonal grooves into a 7 1/2-foot-tall slab of lime wood. He has blackened the bottom of the slab, so the piece as a whole suggests an image of slashing rain on soaked earth. Internal contradictions improbably give the piece content: the sense of motion coaxed from a totemic ally static piece of material, scorching creating the impression of waterlogged ground and the blatant evidence of process producing an image, which typically blots out awareness of process. Sometimes Nash's procedures merely set a process in motion. In "Crack and Warp Column" and the seven elements of "Crack and Warp Wall" , Nash made evenly spaced horizontal cuts in sundried wood columns, and let the exposed layers split and bend at random as moisture leaves them. The directness of Nash's techniques and the familiarity of his material can leave his work looking as offhand as folk art. But anyone who knows modern sculpture will see Nash's familiarity with it winking from his work. Merely think of the segmented verticals in "Crack and Warp Wall" as spinal columns and the memory of Henri Matisse's wall-hugging bronze "Backs" rushes in, though they are modelled and cast, rather than carved. Several of Nash's new pieces let us see a surrealistic side not always apparent in his work.
"Walking Manzanita", an upended tree, truncated and stripped to its thickest branches, looks like a headless, multiplexed something gingerly picking its way across the floor on cloven hooves. Nash has striated each branch with lengthwise cuts to enhance their hint of fluid animation. "Walking Manzanita" also puns on the titles of Alberto Giacometti's late "Walking Man" sculptures, which echo back to the incipient stride in archaic Greek carved figures where historians see the roots of classical art. Some of Nash's pieces fail to rise above feats of power-tool carving, but his best work displays a relentless—and occasionally fulfilled—ambition to connect with both the ancient and modern energies of his art form.