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.
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