February 25th - March 21st
Private View Wednesday 27th February 6.30

We are very pleased that David Nash has offered to exhibit a range of works in The Penny School Gallery. He is one of Britain's most eminent sculptors with works in most of the worlds major collections including The Tate - London, Metropolitan Museum & Guggenheim Gallery in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art-Tokyo.
The Stoves & Hearths series of sculptures will be shown as photographs which David has never exhibited before in England. There will also be a selection of his small sculptures and a video.
His work is a metaphysical response to nature and a deeply sensitive understanding of its properties,through which he develops new and organic structures and images. He always tries to make works appropriate to the season so each of his sculptures are made 'in harmony with the materials and the elements'.
David studied at Kingston College of Art before moving to Blaenau, Ffestiniog in North Wales, where he lives and works. When the Welsh hill-farmers burned off the dead bracken, the sight of the the smoke seeming to belch out of the mountain side, held a fascination for him. But it was a chance remark by a student, 'Have you ever thought of making a wooden hearth?", which eventually led him to make his first wooden stove. This he made by incising a square block from the centre of a tree which had a narrow vertical slit above.
When lit, it created a perfect stove, combining both the aesthetic and practical function. Since then it has been Nash's practice to make a Stove wherever he is working, in materials most appropriate to the place. Indeed traces of fireplaces have always been one of the most basic indications of the presence of man.
The Stoves series can be read as conceptual or performance works as well as being entities in their own right. Fire, one of the elemental forces became the genesis for new and provocative forms which he subsequently developed into the Light on Black series of works.