In 1983, an open-topped truck unloaded an unusual cargo in Kensington Gardens: 83 hunks of turf cut from Cae’n y Coed, a wooded hillside in the Ffestiniog valley. The ring of turf measuring eight metres in diameter that was removed from the park beside the Serpentine Gallery in west London to make space for the Welsh sods was then trucked from London to north Wales. So began Sod Swap, a piece of sculptural defiance by David Nash, which has had an unexpected and epic afterlife.
More than 40 years later, photographic artist Mike Perry restaged the work as Reverse Sod Swap, exchanging exactly the same amount of turf between Springfield Park in Hackney, east London, and pastureland in Pembrokeshire, with strikingly different results. With twin works acquiring new relevance in a time of extinction and climate crises, the sod swapping is now the subject of a new book. It all began, says Nash, who is 80 and still working with wood and trees, with his own “bloody-mindedness”.
He was invited to contribute to a new Serpentine gallery show of British sculpture. He submitted an idea of some wood sculptures for an indoor gallery because he felt too many outdoor sculptures were “like UFOs, they came and they went”, as he puts it. He’d actually created an outdoor piece for a Serpentine show when he was a postgrad student at Chelsea Art School in 1970.
When he tried to secure it in the ground he was told he couldn’t touch the Kensington Gardens turf because it belonged to the queen. So this time, he plotted to rough up the manicured London park’s immaculate lawns by installing a ring of wild grassland from north Wales while also challenging definitions of “sculpture”. There was a lot of “bright red metal” around in the early 80s, says Nash wryly.
It was nothing to do with the environment, really, but it turned out to be.” Nash was anticipating a reaction and he got one. After several worried meetings about the dig, and head-scratching from council officials about the risk of “invasive” Welsh plants contaminating Kensington Gardens, Sod Swap went ahead. The Serpentine expected him to bring in a big wooden sculpture.
And he said: ‘No, I’m going to cut up your lawn.’ He wanted to show who he is as a person but also what sculpture could be – it doesn’t have to be a solid object on a plinth. It can be an ephemeral piece of organic material.” In 2023, when Perry started a rewilding and art project on 4.9 hectares (12 acres) of farmland in west Wales, he wondered if he might revisit Nash’s concept, four decades on. Slightly nervously, he contacted Nash, and was relieved when the sculptor gave an enthusiastic “yes”.
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