Mature, confident, fit, and incessantly and variously active: much to the surprise of anyone who meets him, David Nash is now in his sixties. He was a sculpture student at Chelsea School of Art in 1969-70, but as he was a post-graduate student, I and my colleagues in the History of Art and Complementary Studies department did not get to know him personally. The School's courtyard was not large and not considered a working area. But it invited elevation, not least because of the practice tower belonging to the fire station next door. We watched as Nash's tower (Chelsea Tower 1) grew and grew.Not everyone on the staff thought it a good idea to let someone erect there a rather undisciplined-looking assembly of found timber, with more than a touch of Dadaist anti-formality. But the Head of Sculpture, George Fullard, was encouraging the young man to work without formal or material restrictions. ...

For over forty years, David Nash has made sculpture almost exclusively in wood. At the core of his work is a profound and ever-growing knowledge of trees,enabling Nash to engage closely and intuitively with the varying characteristics of each species of wood that he uses. The extensive statements by him in this book provide a unique insight into both his working methods and the thought processes provoked by this extraordinary collaboration with trees. Early on Nash rejected the hitherto challenged notion that only unseasoned timber could be used by artists or craftsmen. The direct result of this is that in much of his work, the moment when he has finished carving a piece is only the beginning of the development of the sculpture as it reacts to heat, light, moisture or drying.

In the late 1960s, he moved to the Welsh slatemining town of Blaenau Ffestiniog, where he bought a redundant chapel where he could both live and work; the crucial role of the chapel as a home for a developing and shifting population of sculptures is chronicled here for the first time. From this base,he has produced a stream of works, sometimes closely related to the landscape in which he lives,sometimes made abroad. Often when he works away from home, he has been invited to a place where an abundance of fallen wood provides the opportunity to make a whole family of sculptures hailing from the same source. This book focuses particularly on three of these worksites, referred to by Nash as 'wood quarries', in France, Spain and Japan.

On a piece of land not far from his home, Nash has for over thirty years been planting and then coaxing groups of trees to take on forms such as domes and bowl shapes. These subtle, beautiful sculptures are, in Nash's words, 'coming' or growing works. Others, which he sees as 'going' works have been made with the intention that over time they will merge again with nature. Perhaps the most impressive of these is a roughly spherical oak boulder, a metre in diameter, which he made in 1978,and then launched into a nearby stream. Over the next 25 years, and with only minimal intervention,he recorded its progress towards the sea, until it finally disappeared.

Also presented here are numerous examples of sculptures dealing with a favourite theme - the universal forms of the cube, the sphere and the pyramid, as well as Nash's highly innovative black sculptures, produced by a controlled charring of the forms which are very different in impact from those left with their natural wood colour.

This lavishly illustrated book has a substantial introduction, tracing the career of David Nash and evaluating his sculpture, by the distinguished art historian and critic, Norbert Lynton, who has known and followed the sculptor's work since the late 1960s.

INTRODUCTION by Norbert Lynton

COMING/GROWING

GOING

WOOD QUARRIES

INSIDE

BLACK

UNIVERSAL FORMS