The Internationally known artist David Nash has returned to Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) this December following his major 2010 exhibition at the Park. New commission Black Mound overlooks the Park’s historic lakes and references the natural cycle of wood. The work is made from coal and oak charred black, through carefully controlled burning.
David Nash says: “With wood sculpture one tends to see ‘wood’, a warm familiar material, before reading the form: wood first, form second. Charring radically changes this experience. The surface is transformed from a vegetable to a mineral – carbon – and one sees the form before the material.”
Black Mound is one of two new works for the open air commissioned as part of the newly formed European Land Art Network, an initiative which seeks to extend critical debate and understanding around the contribution art and artists can make to the sustainability of landscape, rural development and regeneration. Echoing Nash’s famous Ash Dome, planted in 1977, the second commission 49 Square comprises 49 Himalayan birch trees, which, planted in seven rows of seven, will grow to form a white cube on the lake’s embankment.
Black Mound and 49 Square complement Nash’s Seventy-one Steps, a site-specific work on the walking route to Longside Gallery made in 2010, and two works made during the artist’s 1982 residency, Three Stones for Three Trees and Barnsley Lump.
Curated by Nicholas Alfrey, Joy Sleeman and Ben Tufnell, this exhibition features work by some of the most important British artists of the last 50 years including Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Richard Long and Anthony McCall. Drawing largely from the Arts Council Collection and supplemented by important loans from artists and major public institutions, Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979 takes a fresh look at the art of this period and considers what was particular about the way land art developed in Britain. Within the context of YSP, the exhibition is complemented by site-specific installations by Andy Goldsworthy, David Nash and James Turrell. The exhibition, which toured throughout 2013, makes its last stop at Longside Gallery, the permanent home to the Art Council Collection’s sculpture holdings and an important research centre.
David Nash is featured in forthcoming exhibition Uncommon Ground: Land Art in Britain 1966–1979, a touring exhibition from the Arts Council Collection which opens at YSP’s Longside Gallery on 5 April 2014.