Working with Trees
Planting and nurturing live trees, carving and honing dead trees, I learn better how to behave in the environment we share.
Trees have a life resembling our own, they communicate with others and have a social life. They work to thrive, trading in the soil with fungi, sugars for mineral, and trade in the air, oxygen for carbon dioxide. This subtle economy enables them to build resilient bodies and to propagate and at the same time enrich the environment. They take just enough and give back more.
In life they stand balanced, spreading, defiant, weaving the elemental forces of light, warmth, water, earth and air into their material bodies. Essentially they are fully alive to their environment.
In death they surrender to insects and fungi that live on and in them. Their activity takes the tree back into the ground, reintegrating it as humus. At all stages, trees and wood speak their place and progress in this great cycle of coming and going, soaked in weather and time.
For sculpture I only use trees that have become naturally available at the end of their lives. These trees become a wood quarry for me. Often working where they fell I follow their veins, shapes and volumes to find forms that echo their character and story, giving it voice.
David Nash, 2022