The artists celebrating the beauty of nature

3 October 2022

A marvellous kind of modern art echoes the earliest creative impulses of humans. It can take decades, even centuries, to make. It doesn't exist in galleries. Its creators find inspiration in nature. In Art Out of Nature on BBC Four, James Fox travels across Britain in search of these breathtaking artworks with the power to change the way we think about landscape, and about art.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation, which covers thirty acres in Dumfriesshire, southern Scotland, was created at his home by the landscape artist, architect and theorist Charles Jencks in 1988. More recently, Jencks has completed the Crawick Multiverse, a monumental series of land forms also in Dumfriesshire that opened to the public in 2015. It references stone circles, long barrows and burial mounds, and like the Cosmic Garden is inspired by the science of our own age.

Jencks told James Fox: “I think when you see the sun go down, and you see the earth form these pathways, and the light is at the top, you definitely feel as if you belong here, as if this is a part of you. It's not just a projection, it's kind of a deep feeling, and I think you get that in landscape... and you don't get it in any art that is not bigger than you.”

Julie Brook is an artist who has tested herself and her art against the rhythms of the sea. In the early 1990s, Julie Brook spent two years living in a cave on the island of Jura, off the west coast of Scotland. Her intention was to capture the harsh beauty of the island in paint. But the experience of living in solitude in such an exposed landscape changed the way she made and thought about her practice.

Julie wanted to create a kind of art that encapsulated the elemental forces that were all around her. The result was an extraordinary combination of fire, stone and water - what she called her Firestacks.

Andy Goldsworthy lives and works not far from the Cumbrian Hills, in the Scottish Borders. Every morning, he walks out into the fields around his home to make a work in the landscape.

Elm Stack, above, is formed from worked-around branches pushed into matted deadwood on a small waterfall in Dumfriesshire.

Andy tells James: “The reason why I love to work with my hands is that friction. There is this terrific, wonderful resistance to the land that challenges you. It creates sensations and feelings that inform me as an artist.”

The work pictured below, Ice Star, was created used icicles which Andy found on the rocks in Scaur Water, Penpont, Dumfriesshire. He used saliva to fuse the bases of the icicles together to form a fragile star.

‘The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few, but the sky is for all.’

James Fox says: “I love these words, written by John Ruskin more than 100 years ago. He is, of course, right. Too often we ignore the beauty that lies above us. It is indeed the eternal masterpiece. And in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, one structure has been devised expressly to draw our focus up to the sky. For me, it is one of Britain's most inspiring artworks.”

The outside view of American artist James Turrell's artwork at Yorkshire Sculpture Park conceals a specifically proportioned chamber with an aperture open to the sky.

James spent a few hours here contemplating the view below: “I've seen this amazing palette of blues change, I've seen clouds scud across the ceiling, and I've seen the odd cameo of birds and jet planes. It has been completely gripping throughout. One of the lessons that James Turrell teaches you is patience, because you can't just come in here and spend 30 seconds and then walk out again.

“You have to sit down, look up, and you have to just wait, and to adjust to the rhythms of nature. It reminds me that
the greatest art does something very simple. It makes the familiar seem completely unfamiliar. It makes you see the world in an entirely new way.”

Ash Dome was made by artist David Nash, who has lived and worked in North Wales since 1967. In that time, he has devoted himself entirely to making sculptures out of wood. But Ash Dome was something different - 'a living sculpture'. Nash tells James:

“Most outdoor sculptures, I felt they were like UFOs, like they'd been made somewhere else and they'd just landed. I wanted something which belonged to a place, and something which didn't resist the elements but actually engaged with the elements. The Ash Dome came from that thought.”

Nash planted Ash Dome as saplings back in 1977. He employed ancient techniques to adapt the shape of each tree, and over the years he has continued to tend and train them.

“The '70s was a dangerous time, you know, politically, economically, internationally. People were talking about
the human being destroying itself before we got to the 21st century. And I thought, 'I'll make a sculpture which is
aimed at the 21st century.'”