Some of his creations take years for Nash to complete.  He planted Ash Dome, a ring of ash trees in 1977 and then fletched the joints so that as they grew, they appeared to be dancing in sequence and then bending in on each other to form the shape of a dome.  . 

He launched his wooden boulder in a stream in 1979 and followed its progress, urged on by storms and floods until it reached a bigger river and finally the estuary.  He then plotted its progress with the tide up and down the estuary until it finally disappeared.  Now after three years, it has turned up again in the same estuary. 

In Bretton Park, he has charred a tree trunk and bole by building a palisade of sticks around them and setting them alight with a burner.   The surface of the trunk splits and cracks into shiny charcoal nodules.  He has embedded 28 charred oak steps up the Oxley Bank in 30 tons of Barnsley coal.  They will slowly be worn down by people walking on them and return to the earth.  Nash likes to study how things decay. 

He bought his chapel studio in Blanau Ffestiniog in 1967.   Hunkered down n a wasteland of slate, filled with half completed works, one gets the impression that he is waiting for growth and time to transform them and him.    

Occasionally Nash’s his work is more political.  The charred verticals and cross pieces of ‘An awful falling’ evoke the destruction of The World Trade Centre,  while ‘Husk’ a group of hollowed out, charred, rectangular blocks of oak, resemble a burnt out village in Palestine. 

I love the scale of Nash’s work.   Who would wait 30 years for nature to complete a work?  Who would shape a gigantic piece Californian redwood shaped into a square with a gigantic two man chain saw and install it with off-cuts in an underground gallery in Yorkshire?   Who would arrange three massive tree trunks on the lawn, curious to see the way the wood would split.   But at the other end of the scale is elegant Ubus, two slender limbs of wood, one oak, one beech, leaning into each other to resemble an arch, reminiscent of the whalebone arch in Cley-next-the-sea.

This is my second visit to Nash’s epic retrospective at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.  Simon gave me his ticket to the opening and I met the artist.  He had the look of an explorer about him, a trained observer, more scientist than artist; clear, perceptive, curious, calculating and full of insight and possibility.  I marvelled again at the confidence and self belief of the artist and guessed that it came from a fascination with the object and not with himself as the artist.

He piercing blue eyes put me in context as they would a block of wood.   

 ‘So you’re Simon’s brother.  Yes, I see.  You’re like him.  Is he still on the boat?’ 

David Nash’s exhibition will be at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park until February, changing with time and the seasons.  It’s not far away; I shall evolve with it.   

Related posts:

1. Henry Moore; as edgy as a Yorkshire outcrop, as soft as rain. For Henry Moore, art was the expression of the imagination...
2. Creating the Space Art is not just a pleasing arrangement of shapes, textures...
3. Yoga in the Park We had completed the first set of asanas and were...

Moore was the youngest of seven children from Castleford.  His father was a miner.  They were not well off.  His early work was influenced by the primitive; Etruscan funerary monuments, pre Columbian Mexican figures, the statues on Easter Island, Sumerian art, African masks. These forms appealed directly to his emotions.  His reclining figures bear a striking resemblance to the Chac Mool, the Gods in the Yucatan temples.  Action during the First World War traumatised the young man and must have added its influence to his deformed bodily shapes with holes in them. 

Most of Moore’s sculptures were direct carvings, like Jacob Epstein’s. He wanted to keep faith with the medium.  He liked to use local stone; the veins and colour and blemishes in the stone became an integral part of his sculptures.  Like Michelangelo, who quarried his own stone at Carrera,   Moore had a feeling for the material, lived with it until something meaningful crystallised in it.  Craft then shaped it to the final realisation.  He placed his large reclining figures with the gaps and holes in the landscape, so they not only part of the landscape, but you could see the landscape through them. 

Moore didn’t achieve public recognition until the Second World War when Kenneth Clark appointed him a wartime artist.  His images of people asleep on the platforms of tube stations in London summed up the solid, indomitable spirit of Londoners during the blitz and expressed something of hilself.  He would go down into the underground stations, incongruous in his suit and tie  and just observe; he didn’t want to intrude.  He made notes on the way out and then drew what he saw later. 

Moore’s sculptures,  outside the art gallery in Leeds or spaced out in Bretton Park, seem as familiar as Yorkshire pudding, but a new exhibition of his work shows him as edgy and awkward as a Pennine outcrop.  He was influenced by the work of TS Eliot, DH Lawrence and Sigmund Freud.  For Moore, the body as object was erotic, vulnerable, violated, visceral, deformed, open and fragmented.  It allied sex and death; a literal, honest counterpoint to Stalinist ‘realism’; he showed it as it was, not how others wanted it to be.  Formed at the time of global conflict and political upheaval, but heavily influenced by his early life,   Moore’s art was troubling.  The forms an artist creates are an inescapable part of his make-up; Moore’s make-up was troubled.  He longed to know where he came from.  ‘What shape did my mother have before I knew she was my mother?’   One cannot go back further than he has – the moment before one became two. 

Henry Moore was a big man, a working man, craggy and direct,  but as emotional as the wind and rain. There is fear and evasion in his observant eyes.  His celebrity attracted psychoanalytical interpretation, but Moore never wanted to see any hidden or unconscious meaning in the shapes he created.  ‘I felt that if I understood too much about myself I would stop working.’

Eric Neumann in ‘The Archetypical World of Henry Moore’, noted that none of his mother and child compositions were gazing at each other.  And for him, the holes represented separation – the space between too much and too little meaning.   Sometimes the mother was represented as a breast with the head of the infant fused with it and sometimes the infant was a bird devouring the breast and the mother had it by the neck.  It was the psychoanalyst, Melanie Klein, who talked about the significance of the good breast and the bad breast as polarised representations of the mother in the child’s mind.   Within selfhood turns the phantasy of childhood; truth, history and sensation twisted into a familiar form.   Moore acknowledged that he might have ‘a mother fixation’, but none- the-less reports a close relationship with his mother. 

Another psychoanalyst, Francis Tustin has written that Moore’s oeuvre suggests autistic relationships, not related to the gaze or the word but more to the touch.  Moore talked about a common fund of understandable shapes.  He had a tactile relationship with his objects and his medium.  His most expressive memory of his mother was of rubbing her rheumatic back with linament.  It is hardly surprising, therefore, that his female forms are large, substantial maternal figures with broad backs.  Autism is also suggested in the gaps, the bits of the body that don’t connect.   Tustin concludes, by rather fanciful rhetoric, that Moore overcame his autistic childhood  by being able to enfold his experience into the living sensation of shape; thus avoiding the black hole at the very edge of meaning. 

One can almost hear the big man sigh.    

The new exhibition at Tate Britain has been heralded by The Guardian as the most important exhibition of Moore’s work for a generation.  I spent a day there and will go back.  

Related posts:

1. Origins, space and time in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park David Nash has a real fascination with wood.  He knows...
2. Creating the Space Art is not just a pleasing arrangement of shapes, textures...
3. Of daughters, damage and destruction; is that the legacy of Mrs Klein? Melanie Klein might be said to have founded the British...