Sculpture - David Nash

My favourite piece of David Nash sculpture will not be shown at this comprehensive retrospective collection of the Anglo-Welsh sculptor’s art in the Town Hall. In fact it’s highly unlikely that anybody will ever see it again. “A large oak in the hills above the valley became available in the seventies,” he tells me, down the phone from his home in Blaenau Ffestiniog in North-west Wales. “I spent a two year period quarrying it. One thing that emerged was a large roundish lump. I realised the best way of getting it to the studio was by rolling it down the hill. But it rolled into a stream and got lodged in a waterfall.”
 
No matter. Nash decided that the piece of sculpture was best left where it was. “I started making visits to the site to see it, and it was different every time I went there, according to the season and the level of the water. In the spring it was covered in wild plum blossom. In the autumn it was swathed in leaves.” Nash, now world-famous for his land art and ecological sculptures, decided that the progress of the lump of wood, which he entitled ‘Wooden Boulder,’ was an art-work in itself. “It was in the same place for six or seven years, then a storm dislodged it. It took 24 years for it to reach the bigger river in the valley. Eventually it was taken down to the estuary and into Cardigan Bay. For a while it was washed back to shore every tide. Finally it was taken out to sea. I doubt very much I shall ever see it again.”

Nash, who places himself in the ‘pastoral tradition of British art’, works entirely in wood, and only uses material which has been knocked over in a storm or chopped down because it had become a hazard.