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1 1 REAL LIVING ART! David Nash Since the 1970s British sculptor David Nash has been involved with creating sculptures and living art installations the world over. He is perhaps best known for his sculptures that involve living elements, such as trees, whose growth has been redirected. The most notable of these include the Ash Dome (1977), a ring of twenty-two ash trees initiated near David Nash’s home in Wales and still growing. Another such project, Divided Oaks (1985) done for the KröllerMu ̈ller Museum in Otterlo, Holland, involves some six hundred trees. Nash has likewise created sculptures that involve interactions with animals as with Sheep Space (1993) for TICKON (Tranekaer International Center for Art and Nature) in Langeland, Denmark, and more recently for an organic sheep farm in Virginia. His mastery of wood carving is not purely formalist but often involves an extension or referencing of environment and history, as was the case for Through the Trunk, Up the Branch (1985) in Ireland or Nine Charred Steps (1988-89), enacted in Brussels, Belgium. Nash’s work can equally be seen as an ephemeral expression of nature’s ongoing processes. For Wooden Boulder (1978) the oak sculpture carving was left to follow its own course down a slope and then a stream. Over the years it moved hesitantly and according to the laws of nature and gravity along this river, though occasionally intervention has become necessary. JG I first became familiar with your work because of the living circle of twenty-two ash trees called the Ash Dome you planted in the 1970s and which is still growing in the Ffestiniog Valley near your home in Wales. Ash Dome reflects an art whose language integrates nature’s living processes into the art, of which we as human beings are a part. The later Divided Oaks project has that same breakthrough quality as Ash Dome for these works truly involve a crossover into horticulture, and ultimately a redefinition of the artistic process. To me these works pose a challenge to the postmodern ethos that art is somehow segregated, as are most disciplines from the flux and flow of life. Real Living Art! 2 DN In comparison with the Ash Dome, the trees for Divided Oaks, which is in a park at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Holland, were already there. The soil there is very sandy and it is quite tough for plants to grow. There was a quarter acre of very scrubby oak trees that were not growing or developing. So that site was offered to me because they were going to pull all the trees out. There were probably six hundred trees. As they were so close to each other, though still alive they were not able to really grow. The annual growth was negligible. I thought that instead of pulling them all out and planting something anew, I would work with the existing trees. I made a division through them, angling one side to the east and one side to the west. They began with an open space and, at the end of this channel, the trees are crossing over. I had been invited to come and make something apt, make some sort of interaction that signalled the presence of the human being. JG This kind of work admittedly demands some manipulation of nature. Do you prune the trees? DN It is called fletching. The very small trees, I simply pushed over and put a stake to hold them, while for the larger ones I cut out a series of V-shapes, bent them over and then wrapped them so the cambium layer could heal over. Now this really woke these trees up. My intervention actually stimulated them, and they are obliged to grow. They are now growing and curving up. JG The Ash Dome at Cae’n-y-coed in North Wales is another case of living tree art. DN The Ash Dome was my first planting work. done on my own land on the coast of Wales. It is very different from the Divided Oaks in that I actually made a decision to plant the trees to grow in a particular form. What is also different as compared with Divided Oaks at the Kröller-Müller Museum, which is a long way from where I live, the Ash Dome is near. One of the most important aspects of the Ash Dome conceptually is that I had made...

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