Giles Sutherland

EXPLORATIONS IN WOOD: The Furniture and Sculpture of Tim Stead

Canongate, #25 (pp 100)

A CENTRAL symbol of life, the tree is sacred to artists and despised

by developers whose concept of a park is a car park, whose idea of

growth is entirely economic. Artist-craftsman Tim Stead's nightmare is

of being caught in the cash-flow of calculating developers indifferent

to nature.

It is hard to think of anyone attempting to make anything as

spectacular as a tree when you live, as I do, in a wood and walk among

elm, oak, beech, birch, fir, pine, poplar, and hope for the survival of

the different species. Yet Stead tries. By turning trees into works of

art and craft, he tries to come close to the creativity of nature.

If trees must fall before he can shape them into artistic forms Stead

does not cynically plunder nature for commercial profit, as David

Bellamy explains in a typically enthusiastic introduction to this book.

When a tree decays it releases harmful carbon dioxide into the

atmosphere. Stead's transformed trees lock up carbon so his works,

writes Bellamy, are ''antiques for all our futures''.

All Stead's bits and pieces come from trees native to Britain and his

favourite wood, for environmental reasons, is elm -- easily available

thanks to the threat of Dutch elm disease. He saws and seasons his

timber and finally treats wood with a mixture of linseed oil and

turpentine. His respect for his raw material is admirable.

Stead also raises money for tree-planting. In 1986 he promoted his

''Axes for Trees'' project, sculpting a wooden axe-head for each day of

that year and selling them to buy land on which to plant trees. He

raised #3500 and a good thing too. Stead is evidently a regular green

guy.

Giles Sutherland's illustrated introduction to Stead's work also

serves as a colourful companion to Stead's Botanic Ash exhibition

showing until October 31 at Edinburgh's Royal Botanic Garden where you

can buy a paperback version of the book at #14.99 and see what the

artist did with wood from a massive 170-year-old ash tree felled before

it rotted away. Stead lives off dead wood, enjoys a woody life.

Many photographs in Sutherland's book focus on Stead's house -- The

Steading, Blainslie, near Lauder -- which is conveniently close to a

small sawmill. Domestic objects crafted by Stead include elm corner

shelves and tables of oak and elm. His bathroom has a wooden sink,

protected from water-logging by heavy varnish.

Stead's bedroom has a wooden four-poster beneath wooden beams so we

can rest assured the artist sleeps surrounded by wood and wakes up with

wood on his mind. One photograph shows him slumped in a chunky wooden

chair in front of an ingeniously constructed wooden desk on which stands

a wooden bookcase and on which sits a small wooden sculpture. He looks

like a man forever pining for wood.

Predictably, Stead describes his work as a tribute to the tree: ''The

more I can retain the 'treeness' of the pieces, the more pleased I am.''

Sutherland goes along with this, portraying Stead as a natural artist

and accepting Stead's suggestion that there are few immediate artistic

influences on his work. Some pictures tell a different story from the

text.

Born in England in 1952, Stead studied at Glasgow School of Art and it

shows. His high-backed chairs in the Memorial Chapel of the Kirk of St

Nicholas, Aberdeen, are influenced by the elongated chairs of Charles

Rennie Mackintosh.

Another influence is Henry Moore, witness the muscular contours of

''Skeletal Armchair''. Though Stead's craft-cum-art is not discussed in

the recent rush of books on Scottish art -- because art historians

snobbishly distance art from craft -- it has interesting affinities with

the playful, visually punning creations of Ian Hamilton Finlay and David

Mach.

Sutherland prefers to place Stead's work in ''a time before

Classicism'' and cites Skara Brae, the Neolithic village in Orkney, as a

''seminal'' influence. Stead refashioned a stone house from Skara Brae

in wood for the Scotland Creates exhibition at the McLellan Galleries in

1990 (this house will be on permanent display at the Hunterian Museum

and Art Gallery from 1995) but his pastiche was far from primitive.

In conversation with Sutherland, Stead verges on the mystical --

explaining, for example, ''I need to have every door of my brain open

and to be almost blank''. Yet before he was a free spirit he was an

ismic artist who, when working in Chester, signed The Fundamentalist

Manifesto which ends: ''The objective of a fundamentalist group is to .

. . liberate creative people from the nunnery of the de-

sign/ architectural/ craft establishment.'' Fundament-

alism sounds suspiciously like a plea for commissions for those

looking enviously at an establishment.

Now Stead can afford to run his own establishment for, on the evidence

of The Steading, he does well by wood. He has no need of manifestos,

fundamentalist or otherwise, as his art wins its own conservational

argument. Sutherland's beautifully produced book reveals a sensitive

soul possessed by the cunning of the master craftsman.