Sculptor Shapes His History on a ‘Tree’

As part of his gently intoxicating show at L.A. Louver, British sculptor David Nash is exhibiting a huge drawing called “Family Tree,” which traces the roots of his current work back through various permutations in nearly 30 years. Artists rarely spell out such routes and links so explicitly, but for Nash, the concept of the family tree is central to his enterprise and the evolving, integrated nature of his vision.

What defines family defines Nash’s art as well: a sense of belonging--to time, to the earth, to life and its continuity.

The aromatic scent of cedar teases the air in the gallery and awakens the viewer to the extra-visual potential of Nash’s work. The artist has initiated several sculptural projects in the environment around his home in North Wales that engage natural processes of growth, change, movement and decay. For his discrete sculptural works, he carves wood with chain saws and hand tools into forms that similarly evoke fundamental impulses, such as flight, nesting, shelter and gestation.

Playfulness frequently leavens the overall profundity of Nash’s work, as in “Cut Corners Column,” a clunky, faceted redwood pillar whose every angular plane is articulated by a deep, charred furrow. The resulting surface is mosaic-like, animated, its stance echoing the shifting weight of the standing human form from Michelangelo to Archipenko.

In “Oak Bakes,” Nash carves wall-mounted domes of oak with the patterns cut into breads by traditional artisanal bakers of Belgium. The tone is light and the patterns jaunty, but the work serves as a homage as well, to the work of the hand and to bread’s sustenance of the body.

Many of Nash’s works resonate with the solidity of ancient forms of shelter or demarcation, but many also engage the qualities of movement through air or water. His “Merging Vessels,” carved of laurel and wall-mounted vertically, reads like a poem in its concise, multiple evocations of boats, pods, bodies and blossoms, all gracefully, sexually converging.

His “Wing” sculptures, too, extract an uncanny weightlessness from the wood through cuts following the grain itself. In Nash’s hands, wood has a fluid vitality, supple as feathers one moment and sturdy as a home the next.

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* L.A. Louver, 45 N. Venice Blvd., (310) 822-4955, through May 30. Closed Sundays and Mondays.