Responding to a brief from Hole & Corner, maker Nic Webb produced a one-off sculptural piece from his rural Sussex base, using the elements that surround him to inform his design. It is, he says, ‘Still life meets apocalypse’…

Words Nick Scott

Previous page: Nic Webb’s Craft, elm, 2018, and opposite: Foreign Vessel, oak, 2018, both shot at Holywell, East Sussex. ‘It’s about the material saying to me, “Well, I’m this shape and I’ve got that quality! What are you going to do?”’, says Webb

Photographs Pete Drinkell

‘The question,’ asserts East Sussex maker Nic Webb, ‘is always, “What narrative can we convey?”’ Joining him to witness a very special project in progress, Hole & Corner finds a man literally in hot pursuit of some weighty existential answers.

In a rustic shack studio close to a traditional Sussex flint threshing barn, on a former Anglo-Saxon settlement now flanked by silent wind turbines, Nic Webb is preparing an ephemeral installation atop an altar-like table. Positioning a charred, glowing bole of cherrywood against a hunk of ice with a posy of meadow flowers captured within its bonded molecules, against which two clay pots have been thrown, he crouches down and steers a gentle jet of air from a hairdryer up towards it. The latest addition to his collection of elements, wind, coaxes the embers into an angry glow, and his extraordinary composition comes to life.

Webb tweaks the angle of the wood slightly to expose more of its glowing façade while – exuding his usual infectious congeniality – he explains the thought process behind his concept. ‘It’s all about how we as humans interact with the elements and manipulate them to serve our needs, our aesthetics, our vision. It’s organic, synthetic, natural, manmade. A collaboration between all. There’s something so classical about this, but it’s also sort of fleetingly cataclysmic. Still life meets apocalypse.’

It’s difficult to know where to begin in telling the story behind the concept of this unique piece, made especially for this issue. A conversation with Webb can convince you to take the narrative back a couple of million years – to the earliest primates ever to execute any kind of creativity. ‘We’re not just the product of what we’ve learnt since birth,’ he says. ‘We’re intrinsically imprinted with certain abilities. You are not just you. You’ve come from an ancient line that goes all the way back to the genesis of humanity. Unavoidably tethered.’

This notion would manifest itself, Webb says, back in the days when he used to teach craft. ‘I used to do day courses, during which everyone would carve a spoon, and it would be so tentative at the start, with people saying, “I’ve never done any making –I don’t think I’m going to be any good” – but at some point just after lunch this kind of silence would fall upon the group and everyone would be making their own way. Within a morning they’d settled into using their hands again. It’s a re-awakening. We’re not so much taught as rebooted to perform something innate.’

Making with one’s hands is a way, says Webb, of becoming closer to what our lives were for many hundreds of millennia before our modern era. ‘I think that the resurgence of interest in craft – greenwood carving or basket-making courses, whatever it may be – isn’t a fad: it’s a real attempt to try to re-engage with something that is becoming palpably and noticeably missing from our psyches. We’re not fully firing. And we’re looking for the answers. We’re looking for the medicine, to rebalance ourselves.’

It’s sound reasoning, but let’s fast forward a little, to just a few generations ago. ‘If you go back on my dad’s side to my great, great grandfather, we know that he was a journeyman –a travelling carpenter in Devon in the 1860s,’ says Webb. ‘We know this because of a tool chest that’s been handed down through each generation. It’s mine at the moment; most of the tools had rusted because no one had used them, but now they’re pretty shiny. Wonderful, old tools in Sheffield steel. My surname would have come from Wëber – Dutch, but probably a German derivative that meant ‘weaver’. So somewhere down the line there was a repetitive, meditative craft within my family.’

artist Melanie Miller has one of the 26 studios that form part of Eel Pie boatyard:

the back of the Eel Pie slipway where boats are brought into the boatyard for repair.

Webb – who moved to this area, just north of Eastbourne, following the birth of his son three-and-a-half years ago, after 20 years in Peckham – says that his formative years helped to shape his current creative yen hugely. ‘I grew up on a Suffolk farm with outbuildings and workshops, and there were always projects on the go – carpentry and all sorts of things. We were surrounded by wooded land, very free to play, and I think an association with the natural world was normal at that time: it didn’t have to be facilitated. From a very early age I was drawn to wood.’

Webb these days prefers his wood to revel in its organic nature: flawed, misshapen and irregular. ‘I like the idea of using materials that others would turn their noses up at,’ he smiles, gesturing to an uprooted trunk, balanced on the edge of his stockpile of wood, which has countless gnarled, tangled, tentacle-like roots. ‘They won’t go through the tree surgeons’ grinders, so they get dropped with me. These pieces wouldn’t usually be considered to have merit or value. I’ve always been on the side of the maverick, the underdog, the unwanted.’

This page: making Flowers with Clay Vase

Michelangelo talked in lofty, celestial terms of his duty to unlock the beauty inherent in his materials, and it’s something Webb can relate to. ‘The more your vocabulary develops, the more fluidly you can interact with material and read it and have a vision of what could happen between you,’ he says. ‘I’m not making chests of drawers, so I’m not looking for stability or tolerance: it’s not a pure imposition of my design onto this material – it’s about the material saying to me, “Well I’m this shape and I’ve got this quality! What do you want to do?” Quite often the finished article is different from the imagined destination. That’s probably true of many creative journeys.’

If this enigmatic relationship with wood, consummated in his formative years, is a major backstory to today’s proceedings, so is his relationship with fire as an artistic tool. ‘The reason I started using fire was, I was creating deeper and deeper vessels, and I thought, “If I set fire to this I can deal with all my nuisance tool marks and return the surface to something more organic”.

This is nothing new – prehistorically embers were taken from a fire, placed on wood, then we’d chip away at this burned timber and gradually hollow a form. It was a functional process, but also a symbolic one. They’d acquire these sections of wood from alder trees, then create objects that, it can be speculated, were kind of offerings rather than functional objects. Using elements to our advantage, rather than struggling against the grain, is a very primal form of ingenuity. Fire, though, is a wonderful servant but a cruel master: it’s quite easy to lose whole pieces of work, or aspects that you were happy with.’

For the hardnosed literary pragmatist, the story behind today’s composition begins early last year, with an installation that didn’t see the light of day at the time because of a real-life event. ‘I set up some big, black pieces of oak and tucked meadow flowers – cow parsley, daisies, all very white – into its cracks, then poured meths over it and set fire to it, and we filmed the spectacle in slow-motion. They burned beautifully – it was just so gorgeous, seeing this monolith and the petals, the most delicate and vulnerable of objects, burning and falling. But this was the week before the Grenfell Tower fire. I couldn’t display it or pursue the concept – it was so raw and so poignant as a metaphor: too emotive, too sad.’

The project turned out to be a catalyst for Webb. ‘I realised that what the Japanese call ikebana, which translates as “living flowers”, is very spiritual, symbolic, metaphoric – and involves beautiful structures. We tend to think of flower arranging as staid and conventional in the Western world, but it’s an art form that can convey hard, raw information in a blink of an eye. And that’s where this concept has come from – how might we use objects and materials to communicate a primal, elemental sense of truth? The question is always, “What narrative can we convey? The fragility of life? The loss of others? Unfairness, injustice, love, pain?”’

The notion of capturing pieces that have a short lifespan, via a lens, appeals to Webb. ‘What you’ve just witnessed isn’t going to be seen in a gallery because it’s over in 10 minutes, it’s a Health & Safety nightmare and it’s ever-changing – whereas with photography we’re capturing the moment and we can say whatever we want to say. We’re in a time-based land here, and each moment – each frame – is complete. This stuff can’t be bought, sold, acquired or belong to anyone – the photography is the only record.’ As with the work of Richard Long or Andy Goldsworthy, if it wasn’t for the photograph, few would bear witness to the moment. That ‘unhaveability’ brings another aspect to it: This isn’t about the generation of revenue or viable product; it’s not a commodity; it’s about experimenting, playing, witnessing, being in contact with these materials, not knowing what we’re really doing… We didn’t even know how well such a large body of water would freeze. So every time you get to the next stage you’ve got to reinvent your expectations.’

Today’s composition is not the only collaboration between Webb and the photographer Pete Drinkell, whose shots grace these pages. Drinkell has previously filmed an award-winning series of shorts depicting Webb’s making processes – and, yesterday, the pair traipsed over the East Sussex coastline looking for suitable places to shoot four of Webb’s other works in carefully selected natural settings. ‘We shot one in organic green surroundings, one as part of a seascape, one by some chalk cliffs down in Eastbourne – really pared back, stony – and then another with a backdrop of fire,’ Webb explains.

‘I got this lovely sense of being in the elements: barefoot, walking through seaweed and over barnacles with harsh textures, slipping… We worked hard – we carried pieces that are 20kg each probably about two miles; Pete carried his 30kg camera bag across the beach – and we experienced our ineptness. Pete slipped into the water at one point and had to hold his camera aloft to save it from the sea. But in a very short period of time we weren’t slipping as much. We got used to it. It was a case of direct association with reality: integrating and practising with truth as opposed to imagining it and aping what we believe to be real. This is the primal self to some degree. Making is a primal activity, not just physically but mentally. And when we’re dealing with the mental we can quite quickly start straying into the territory of what is spiritually in service of ourselves and our wellbeing. That’s what craft and such practices are doing – they’re uplifting us to the highest form of self, giving us the opportunity to awaken. That’s what grabs me.’

Fire, Earth, Air and Water: ‘This stuff can’t be bought, sold, acquired or belong to anyone – the photography is the only record’

Nic Webb in his rural East Sussex studio. The crossover of art and craft is a theme that he is increasingly exploring in his work

Yew Wood, 2018, a private commission

If you’ve visited Webb’s site lately, or perhaps seen his work exhibited at the Sarah Myerscough Gallery, you’ll have encountered work of an abstract nature: his Lost Vessels and Fire Bowls series, for example – which are ‘borne of a desire to work with wood instinctively in an attempt to free my work from the convention and perception of the made object’.

There was a time, though, when he focused on making objects of a more functional nature. ‘I made spoons, bowls and vessels for 10 years, which was wonderful meditation, I learnt so much –a vocabulary, a new language, a language that I can now apply in a more communicative form.’ He gestures to the still burning but soon to expire installation of melting ice and smouldering cherry and pauses: ‘At least, that’s the general plan...’

The interplay between what constitutes art and what constitutes craft is endlessly intriguing to Webb. ‘All practices are segregated and pigeonholed – this is one thing, that’s another – but this notion now is well and truly being dissolved. Everything can cross over everywhere and our vocabulary has greatly increased. Grayson Perry is a lovely example of someone who’s taken functional pottery and inlaid his tapestries of tabloid-esque image and narrative, utilising the canvas of craft for the placement of his art. Picasso was doing the same and it is not such a leap to perceive Richard Long’s A line made by walking as being equal to this. The natural landscape was Long’s canvas. Everything can belong, everything can be read on many levels. We witness it on the bowbreak of our thoughts.’

Next up for Webb is a project called Polder, set to be completed over the next six months or so and named after the flatlands in the Netherlands where land is being reclaimed. ‘They cordon off a section of sea or marshland, pump out the water and generate entirely new areas for humanity to use,’ Webb explains. ‘So the work will encompass notions of human ingenuity, and our ability to ask, “How can we make things work for us; how can we progress and develop; in which environment will we thrive?” It’s a progressive metaphor for the way in which all of us think about many aspects of our lives: the physical, the practical and the spiritual. How do we grow, how do we balance ourselves, how do we create stable ground on which to function and have a platform from which we can evolve further?’

The work will be an assemblage of clay, wood and other materials, Webb says, and ‘a balance of colours, forms and textures’, adding: ‘What I hope to do is use the language of craft to speak in the world of art.’ It’s a project that animates him, but Nic Webb now has another thing on his mind: to take today’s narrative forward – to recreate that composition again, and see if he can make it speak to him, and all who witness it, in a manner that is even more primal, elemental and profound. Placing another elegantly misshapen hunk of cherrywood into a burning oil drum and peeling away a black plastic mould from a fresh block of ice, marvelling at the clarity and beauty of the suspended meadow flowers locked within its clutches, he’s a man who could not be more in his element. nicwebb.com; sarahmyerscough.com