David Nash is an English Land artist, part of a tradition of artists who are individually different in their approaches to making art but are linked in that their primary work is excecuted in the rural or wild outdoors. Richard Long and Hamish Fulton (who began this sort of work somewhat earlier than Nash) and Andy Goldsworthy (who began somewhat later) are, with Nash, the best known Land artists.
Although Nash makes some work that is ephemeral in the landscape, most of his works are sculpture pieces, sometimes portable, sometimes not. They employ traditional forms fashioned by straightforward handwork occasionally augmented by natural forces like fire or erosion. He usually works with wood from whole trees that have died; through his intervention, they receive new life as sculpture. He generally finds his forms in the wood: the way it has grown, the way it splits, or - sometimes - the way it burns. He looks for form that is basic, or seems to be underlying, and then emphasizes it, repeats it, or improvises on it.
Nash is interested in Chinese poetry and has done several lengthy projects in Japan, and these connections play a part in his fascination with the forms of the square, circle, and triangle - or cube, sphere, and pyramid. The notion that all natural things have an underlying geometric structure - crystals, molecules, atoms for example - is not specifically Asian. However, in Zen painting here is tradition going back hundreds of years implying that the circle, square, and triangle, in themselves, have an anchoring effect on human beings.
Nash’s two aquatints, being released by Crown Point Press, use these forms. In Square Circle Triangle: light in Dark, the forms are insubstantial, seemingly made by the light, illuminated from within. The appear to be trhowing off light into the background. In Square Circle Triangle: black in light the forms are weight, pulling in on themselves like black holes, grounded in a large wAhite area of exposed paper. Nash has done a number of sculptures of spheres, pyramids and cubes set side by side. Some have been fashioned of wood and then charred. The resulting blackness, he says, turns your attention from the organic material of the wood to the mineral material (carbon) caused by fire. In these sculptures and also in the etchings, the elemental forms are modified by the materials, and also by the human activity used to create them.