Exhibitions 1
Timber treatment
Andrew Lambirth
With the Grain: Wood Sculpture by David Nash Lewes Town Hall, Sussex, until 10 June Jeffery Camp — Rubicon Art Space Gallery, 84 St Peter’s Street, N1, until 2 June In the foyer of Lewes Town Hall is a sculpture by David Nash called ‘Shrine’, made from American Redwood, a lapped and sheltering piece half-turned in on itself, as if in meditation. It’s placed here to welcome the visitor and to signpost the exhibition from the street — to suggest to anyone peering in at the door that something strange and different is afoot in these august public offices. And august they are, as you will see as you process up the impressive and intricately carved late Tudor staircase, into a long corridor hung with photographs of Nash at work.
At the far end, filling the doorway to the Regency Assembly Room, are the darkened twin verticals of another sculpture wedges of wood of intriguing aspect. As you draw closer, these charred oak standing figures are revealed to their full extent, crowned with approximate human features and called ‘King and Queen’, as if in response to Henry Moore’s famous sculpture of this subject.
Moore was in fact a precursor of Nash in the Town Hall, for the team responsible for this exhibition (Ann Elliott and Paul Myles) have organised a series of sculpture displays at Lewes of which this is the fourth. They began in 1999 with Rodin, moved on to Anthony Caro in 2001, Moore in 2004, and now Nash. It’s a brilliant idea to utilise the vast ballroom with its sprung floor and high ceilings for large sculpture, and, in the case of Nash, the organisers have decided to emulate the kind of crowded installation the artist himself favours in the old Welsh chapel where he keeps his work.
Since 1966, Nash has lived and worked in Blaenau Ffestiniog, two years’ later buying Capel Rhiw and its adjoining schoolhouse. He still lives in the schoolhouse, but the chapel is no longer his studio. When he first began to use trees that had fallen or died naturally, they would often be in inaccessible locations, and he would travel to them to work. Although Nash has worked on-site in various parts of the world, it remains preferable to do at least some of the work back in the studio. As he gradually became able to afford to transport the wood to Wales, his reliance on a petrol chainsaw to make the sculptures necessitated a different sort of workspace, and he now works in four medium-sized industrial units, complete with carving shed, yard and hoist. Meanwhile, the chapel has become a cross between a store and a museum.
You can see photographs of the chapel set-up in the entrance corridor, and compare the installation of sculptures there with the intimate throng of forms in the assembly room. These are sculptures from the artist’s own collection, a group of works he has decided not to sell or in some cases has bought back, in order to keep a representative selection of his own work. Inevitably, for inhabitants of a chapel, they have become known as ‘the congregation’. They are all eye-catching, and take your gaze to different levels of the room. (The light is good and changes dramatically through the day. The pasteltinted stained glass and pale blue cornicing do not distract. Even the four large paintings, including one of the visit of King William IV and Queen Adelaide to Lewes, don’t compromise the sculptural impact.) One of the floor-based pieces is called ‘Yew Red Dome’, and consists of 151 separate chunks of wood, arranged in seven different heights. Another is ‘Serpentine Vessels’, open rocking pockets of beech, one cut from inside the other. Other sculptures stretch arms or trunks (one of the ‘Ubu’ pieces has a distinctly elephant-like proboscis) to the ceiling, or seem to be stacked in towers. In fact, the columns are cracked or cut wood, sliced on the horizontal, sometimes (as in ‘Multi-Cut Column’) articulated vertically also.
Nash delights in the interplay between organic and geometric forms — the absolute fixed beauty of geometry in collision with the changing forms of nature. He makes straight lines with his chainsaw, but he’s happy to see them disrupted, as they are in ‘Cracking Box’, as the green wood dries out and warps and splits. A large part of Nash’s artistic activity is a form of husbandry or intervention in nature; for instance in the training of living trees to grow in specific shapes. (A development of the ancient rural traditions of hedging and pleaching.) As part of this exhibition, a short film will be showing of perhaps his most famous intervention, ‘Wooden Boulder’, in which a rough sphere was carved from the base of a massive oak. Originally Nash planned to get it back to the studio to work on it and so levered it into a nearby stream in order to help it roll downhill. The boulder’s progress soon became the work of art. Nash kept a visual diary of its very gradual movement down the stream to join the River Dwyryd, and its eventual journey to the sea, part of which was filmed. This really is art unfolding over time: the whole journey lasted from 1978 to 2003.
Some 30 Nash sculptures are on show, with a new piece made from Sussex oak called ‘Big Bud’ carved specially for the occasion and placed in nearby Southover Grange Gardens. On the train back to town, timber clearance beside the line suddenly seemed full of potential. What form could those logs have taken if not so brutally standardised? David Nash makes us think anew and critically about our environment. Back in London, an 84th birthday celebration for Jeffery Camp shows this artist working with undiminished vigour and originality. In a remarkable group of new paintings, some of them more than tenfeet wide or high, Camp pushes ever further the boundaries of his art. Nearly all the work has been done in the past year or two, though the eagle-eyed will spot a Beachy Head landscape from more than 20 years ago featuring a nude Norman Rosenthal looking surprisingly trim. The subjects remain substantially the same: figures juxtaposed with the meeting point of air, land and sea, often on Sussex downland, but sometimes beside the Thames in London, or as far afield as Dorset’s Lulworth Cove. What has changed is the handling. Camp has in the past always relied on a precision of drawing to establish his figures and their settings. Now that linear particularity has been largely jettisoned in favour of a new richness of colour and surface texture.
It’s heartening but also truly exciting to witness a late flowering of this sort. Not only do Camp’s pictures look amazing, but their installation at Art Space is also difficult to fault. From the moment you enter the gallery to be greeted by the dynamic large landscape ‘Cleft’, with its soaring and plunging rainbow-like central arc, you are drawn into a new and better world. The small, exotically shaped paintings and vignettes are perfectly distributed among the larger pictures. Downstairs is a powerful combination: a stupendously luminous painting of ‘Sunset’ (bought, I gather, for a public collection) next to ‘Red Scarfed Thames’, a self-portrait of sorts. Further on, in the splendid double-height end gallery, hangs the extraordinary ‘Ralph’, a vast, roughly cruciform picture, a vision of English landscape of much originality and breadth.
Camp’s personalised geography has never looked better. These lyric scenes have a sweetness and power that call for a response. Camp has titled the exhibition ‘Rubicon’ in recognition of his own irrevo cable commitment to this late style. It’s time we made a similar commitment to such life-affirming art.
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