Photo by Sue Lowndes
David Nash is a British sculptor and land artist whose work I first encountered in verbal ‘translation’ in Roger Deakin’s Wildwood.
Ash Dome, whose location is kept secret, is a sculpture that belongs in its landscape and is an active collaboration with nature. David Nash planted the ash trees in 1977 near his home in North Wales. As they grew the young ash trees were bent and shaped into a vortex. A long-term commitment and act of faith in humanity’s ability to continue despite the cold war, Nash’s ring of twenty-two ash trees was meant to outlive him. However, the trees have contracted a deadly fungus (not all tree-fungi relationships are good) and the ash dieback will kill the trees over the next years. An article on Artnet describes Nash’s stoical reaction to the work’s death.
In a work similar in spirit to Richard Long’s walks, Nash followed the journey of an enormous wooden boulder. Nash cut this boulder from a downed tree, intending to use it in his studio. After cutting the massive boulder of wood, he released into a stream close by as an easier way to transport it, intending to float the boulder down the stream to his studio. However, since this was a mountain stream and the boulder was immense and very heavy, it quickly got stuck. Since then Nash has documented this process of tracking the boulder, over a total of 25 years, watching it get stuck and then be moved on by floods and winter storms. In David Nash’s words:
During the first 24 years it moved down stream nine times remaining static for months and years. Sedentary and heavy it would sit bedded in stones animated by the varying water levels and the seasons. Beyond the bridge its position survived many storms, the force of the water spread over the shallow banks did not have the power to shift it. 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 high tides around full moon and the new moon moved it every 12 hours to a new place, each placement unique to the consequence of the tide, wind, rain and depth of water.
In January 2003 it disappeared from the estuary but was found again in a marsh. An incoming tide had taken it up a creek, where it stayed for five weeks. The equinox tide of March 19 2003 was high enough to float it back to the estuary where it continued its movement back and forth 3 or 4 kilometres each move.
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.
David Nash
The wandering oak ball became a way for Nash to explore the landscape and a palpable way to experience the stream, the water levels and the weather. It also seemed to become a giant game of hide and seek and a conversation starter as neighbors called him each time they rediscovered it.