AN OLD SCULPTURE IN THE SHORT NETTLES

The idea behind this was blatantly stolen. Nonetheless, I still have a lot of affection for the resulting item.

It was my first sculpture for a narrow strip of reclaimed allotment that runs along Old Lyme Hill. It's got a handful of my pieces now and some traditional weaving willow is growing well in terraced beds which I established three years ago.

This particular piece is my first chainsaw exercise in rip-cutting. It heavily borrows from the first piece I ever saw by David Nash. That was SO exciting at the time, and a couple of years later I took the opportunity to retain the bottom of a doomed ash tree (that just found itself to be growing in the wrong place) and just did it.

A couple years passed and our cat Smudge died and was buried right here, next to it. And all the time, nature is creeping back especially with these aggressive nettles, which I scythe mercilessly three times or more a year.