ABSTRACT
An artist and sculptor in wood; draughtsman. His foundation year was at Kingston College of Art (1963-4) and he studied painting for a year at Brighton College of Art (1964-5), before returning to Kingston to take up sculpture (1965-7). His postgraduate year was at Chelsea College of Art (1969-70). Nash spent every summer from 1950 at Blaenau Ffestiniog in Wales and the importance to him of the place made him buy a disused chapel there (1968) in order to convert it into a studio and home for his family. His earlier work in wood used standard milled wood, which he painted; he constructed a series of 9 m-high towers in this way. He then started staining rather than painting the wood, later using the natural colour of the planks. From that point he began using raw timber of fallen trees, and shortly after developed into growing, pruning and weaving living trees. Ash Dome (1977) at Caen-y-Coed, Maentwrog, is a 60 m in diameter circle of young trees planted by Nash. Each tree is trained at an angle, so that in some thirty years' time they will form a living dome of branches. He has held residences in Grizedale Forest, Lake District (1978), where he made Running Table and Wooden Waterway, and at the YorkshireSculpture Park (1982). In a series of outdoor projects (1979-82), he made hearths of sticks, clay, stone, slate, wood, peat, snow and seagrass, in which he laid fires; Wood Stove (1979, Maentwrog) was an ephemeral work of this period, whilst Coal Stove (1982, coal), unusually for Nash, is cut from a mineral rather than from wood. Flying Frame (1980, oak, Tate Gallery) incorporates a vertically held rectangular frame in a structure made of natural branch growths. During the 1990s Nash made a number of burned or charred sculptures, such as Charred Column (1993, burnt oak) or Cube, Sphere, Pyramid (1997-8, oak). His many commissions include Eighteen Thousand Tides (1966) for Eastbourne, Divided Oak and Turning Pines (planted sculptures) for the National Park of Höge Veluwe, Otterlo in the Netherlands. He became an RA in 1999. He is often abroad making site works for museums and galleries in Europe, the USA and Japan.
