Capped Arch 門

Nash has lived in the woods of Wales and Yorkshire since the mid 1970s, and has produced works employing pieces of untreated wood to express the relationship between man and nature. This particular work was made for the exhibition "British Art Today" (Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum and other venues) of 1982. Most of his works starts in an inspiration he receives when he is struck by the shape of a natural piece of wood in its original environment. For the above exhibition, he came to Japan one month before the opening, and stayed in the woods of Oku-Nikko and made five works. This work titled "Capped Arch" uses a tree torn in two from the base during a typhoon and lay fallen on the ground. He has cut the torn trunk with a chain saw into one two-legged piece and two one-legged pieces, and then put them together. Nash chooses not to fell living trees for his work but to make use of fallen trees and branches he finds in nature. This attitude of his has been generally understood as the expression of his concern for ecology, but the use of the chain saw and the form reminiscent of a gate of a building mark this work as an artificial creation. Nash's respect for nature does not involve simple-minded nature worshipping and denouncement of civilization, but is directed toward the examination of the relationship between man and nature, with the man needing to protect himself from nature and the nature, in turn, being helpless against man's destruction. This form, created through the artist's choice of not touching living trees and the smallest possible artificial intervention of cutting and joining, symbolizes the relationship of man and nature in its primordial state.