Artists: Richard Long - David Nash

To attend the breakfast reception, RSVP required via rsvp@cristearoberts.com

Cristea Roberts Gallery presents a two-person exhibition featuring works on paper by Richard Long and David Nash. Both artists have made nature and earth’s raw materials, such as wood and stone, the centre of their sculpture. Time and Tide explores this element of their practice but in a two-dimensional form. Over twenty works include screenprints by Richard Long (b.1945) depicting rivulets of muddy water from the banks of the tidal River Avon in the UK and pastel editions by David Nash (b.1945) focusing on trees and their lifecycle through the seasons.

Richard Long, who has commented “my work operates on all different scales, from a fingerprint to a thousand miles,” makes work that originates from and is often realised in natural environments. He documents his journeys around the world, from the coastline of England to the peaks of Antarctica, exploring the concepts of locality, time, distance and measurement. The exhibition features screenprints from a series of work entitled The Tide is High, inspired by a site close to Long’s home in the city he was born and continues to live, Bristol.

Each print, which depicts rivulets of muddy water, is based on drawings made from mud taken from the banks of the River Avon. Long enjoys working with this mud for its tactility and material simplicity. The rise and fall of sea levels which create the River Avon’s high tides and huge steep mud banks exposed at low tide, are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon as it orbits earth. Everything Long makes relates back to the earth’s surface; the prints on show represent this natural force which has traced the earth for over a millennia.

David Nash is inspired by his local landscape in rural North Wales. Mainly working with trees by carving and growing sculpture in wood, Nash explores a sense of place and our relationship with the natural environment. Concerned for and interested in ecology, Nash often recycles the natural materials he uses - the wood for his sculptures comes from trees that have fallen naturally or have been felled due to age.

The artist’s works on paper are as central to his practice as sculpting three dimensional forms. The editions on show in Time and Tide focus on trees, giving shape to the artist’s ideas, recording and responding to the forms and colours of the trees themselves.

Nash delicately depicts the enormous force of trees in pastel. Each work is produced by hand, where pastel is applied through a stencil. Bright reds and coopers depict autumnal images, whilst a pair of editions, entitled Oak Leaves in May 1 and 2, 2019, trace the changing colours of leaves on one tree, over one month in Spring. Nash explains,

“I noticed when daily passing a stand of oaks in May that the leaves were just starting to emerge from their buds. Some of the oaks were more advanced than others. The ones coming later were very small and an amber gold, and the ones more advanced were a little larger and yellow.

As the days passed the early oak leaves grew larger and progressed to a light green as the chlorophyl evolved and then to a deeper green. All the trees went through this colour change over ten to fourteen days. Later the leaves became a dark waxy green as they engaged in the summer long work of photosynthesis. I worked through my colour range and finding more pastels locally I found the colours that represented this colour evolution.”

A further group by the artist depicts one of his seminal works, Ash Dome, planted in 1977. The stencil editions made in 2021, entitled Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, trace the changing colours of the Ash Dome’s leaves and branches as they grow and transform through the seasons. It was whilst nurturing the trees that Nash was drawn into their seasonal cycle, observing and then ultimately recording the subtleties of the colour and mood variations in these pastel editions.