Imogen Lycett Green meets sculptural vessel-makers Ash & Plumb
Dressed head to toe in matchy-matchy khaki workwear, Barnaby Ash and Dru Plumb meet me at their studio on a cold spring day. They work in a former stable on a beautiful old flint and brick dairy farm off the Lewes-to-Newhaven road. The cows are long gone. Around the courtyard, now filled with pots and climbers, motorbike mechanics, wedding florists and interior designers are at work, all in their own cubbyholes. A van from Truffles bakery pops in at one o’clock. Sausage roll? Prawn bap?
Ash & Plumb make exquisite oak vessels, reminiscent of 5th-century BC Greek vases. As dark and smooth as ebony, the vases or urns, bowls or plates are hand hewn, then burnt with a blow torch and sanded and polished, their natural flaws and the original wood grain leading the finish of each piece. With reverence, I pick up an unfinished oak urn next to me – light, as big and round as a large melon, it looks like a cartoon football trophy, a prop, perhaps, ready for a stage set. Yet this piece, when ready, will sell for, well, a lot. Ash & Plumb are represented by the prestigious international Sarah Myerscough Gallery, and their work has been acquired by several museums, including the National Museum of Scotland. They are in talks with the British Museum, yet they only started making things in lockdown, when they moved to Woodingdean.
What did you do in the Pandemic? Ash & Plumb had a new house but no furniture, so Barnaby thought he’d make wood furniture, following YouTube videos. “Dru was made redundant and after two weeks of lockdown, literally, we were going to either become alcoholics or we had to do something.” So they started making things in wood only six years ago? How did they soar so meteorically from the nursery to the big time? “All that furniture fell apart,” admits Barnaby, “but I learnt a lot. Then I bought a lathe.”
But you don’t just buy a lathe and get your work in a national museum.
Let’s start with who does what. Barnaby is ‘workshop guy’ who handles chisels, axe-grinders, blowtorches, rasps and saws, while Dru photographs the work, defines the aesthetic and handles Instagram (where they have over 88,000 followers). Despite occupying different roles, their artistic vision is shared. “Absolutely,” nods Barnaby. For starters, they decided together that they would make these vessels, echoing universal shapes. “Honestly,” says Barnaby. “I didn’t realise it, but it’s all pregnant bellies and lovely fat bottoms. Women’s bodies! Look!” – he shows me a picture on his phone – “this one looks like a uterus with fallopian tubes.” He shakes his head in wonder, as if perplexed at how it happened. All decisions are made together. Will a vessel have this handle or that handle, or no handle at all? Will a ‘garniture’ – the arrangement of three or five or so vessels, on a mantelpiece, say – work this way or that? Where do we burn, stitch, polish, cut? Here, here or here? Ash & Plumb have a singular vision, but the vision comes from two sets of eyes, two pairs of hands and two hearts, beating in time.
And two dogs. Adorning the farmyard idyll are Oscar and Alfie, sleepy, bear-sized golden retrievers, who perk up at the Truffle van’s ice-cream chimes. “Oscar, who’s four, is a professional socialite, visiting all the studios, he’s become the farm mascot, while Alfie is 13 now, a bit more chilled.” Is it too much of a generalisation to say that artists are more often attracted to dogs whose outline is already a drawing, like whippets, so beloved of Lucian Freud, or dachshunds, of David Hockney? But artists and golden retrievers? These amiable bundles of glossy gold fur are huggable and wonderfully un-cool. But that’s just it. I’m beginning to see that Barnaby and Dru are both cool and cosy. “When we met 13 years ago, we talked about what sort of dogs we would get,” says Dru. “Barnaby had a golden retriever as a child.” Barnaby adds, “When I’m stuck or frustrated with the work, I take Oscar round the field. He gets six walks a day!” The dogs have led them to build an intimate community around their home in Woodingdean, where they moved from Brighton. “We look after each other’s dogs,” Barnaby chuckles. “Brighton was our playground, now we leave work early to babysit our neighbour’s poodle.”
Barnaby may look after the dogs next door, but he was not always a pillar of the community. “Where Dru is the golden boy – honestly, he was head boy at school in Perth, Australia – I left school at 16. Actually, I was expelled.” Barnaby’s father is a Christian speaker and writer, who was vicar of Great Shelford in Cambridgeshire, when Barnaby was a child. A vicar’s son! Dru interrupts: “And Shelford is where my father is from!” Wait a minute. So while Dru was born in Australia, his father – who settled in Perth after marrying Dru’s Burmese mother – is from the very same English village where Barnaby spent his early years? Dru’s father called his Aussie building business Shelford Homes, which is how they discovered the connection. What a coincidence! “I know,” they smile in unison. It’s almost like they still can’t believe it and the Shelford nugget held so preciously at the centre of their journey together, tells me just how important story – and romance – is to both of them.
The professional story is presented in a drier tone. On its website, the Sarah Myerscough Gallery says it ‘represents an international roster of artists working at the intersection of craft, design and sculpture. [Ash & Plumb’s] practices reflect an attunement to cultural relationships with natural materials, particularly wood, combining traditional craftsmanship with innovative approaches that challenge disciplinary boundaries.’
Challenging disciplinary boundaries? Yes. But they are breaking other rules too. The minute they entered the art market, these boys meant business. “Why shouldn’t we make a living by creating beautiful things?” asks Barnaby in his rhetorical way. He answers himself: “I’m shameless about wanting to make a good income from what we do. And it’s got to support both of us. Honestly, I would love to mentor emerging artists about the business of art. Too many artists ‘struggle’.”
But isn’t the ‘struggle’ and the ‘process’ part of what gives art its value? “Well, value is relative, isn’t it?” says Barnaby. “Is it valuable because I believe in it, or because of how it’s made? This is the eternal question in art. Is the story important, is the journey? Or is it the thing itself?”
Making their vessels out of mature oak and burning them with a torch, shaping them, following the way the wood wants to go, all this has been done before. “But that’s the point,” says Barnaby. “There is no new idea, we all make work on the back of others. But Dru and I own up to that. We recognise the traditions that went before us and incorporate them into our work. For instance, working in oak: mythologically, the tree is a powerful symbol, but especially the oak. After hours and days and weeks and now years of research, we understand all our reference points. I’ve also become an expert on sacred geometry.”
“Once he gets obsessed, you can’t get him off track,” says Dru, studying Barnaby over the work bench. Sacred geometry connects nature and maths, linking certain shapes and fractions or ratios to an underlying idea of universal proportion. “Barnaby’s knowledge and adherence to sacred patterns gives the work that balance and form which is immensely satisfactory to the collector,” says Dru. No kidding. Sarah Myerscough – who also represents Marc Fish and John Makepeace, as well as Ash & Plumb’s heroes Ernst Gamperl and Eleanor Lakelin – is seeing their work fly off the shelf. “We used to make pieces to commission, now we are building a body of work, so that Sarah has more than one piece to sell at a time.”
Ash & Plumb talk of a studio by a wood, workshops, a gallery, teaching. “We’ve thought about having kids, but I’d want to be near my family to do that,” says Dru. His parents have been over from Perth to understand what he’s doing. “That meant a lot,” he says. It was his mother’s collection of over a thousand – “more like two thousand,” interrupts Barnaby – bowls and vessels in wood and clay, Greco-Roman copies, plants growing out of them, that spilled into his creative imagination. “Whereas I grew up with bibles,” says Barnaby. Following the vicar’s trail Barnaby moved eight times as his father took up different posts, ending up in London when Barnaby was 14. “I studied dance, I wanted to be a dancer. I was good but not good enough to work in the companies I revered, so I gave that up and went into fashion writing.” When he’s cold in the yard in winter, Barnaby dances around the studio, to R&B and funk. Even today, he’s moving about, full of gestures and fidget. Dru is still, gentle.
Scientists in ‘neuroaesthetics’ are studying how art impacts humans cognitively, emotionally and physically. Art affects three brain systems: the sensory-motor (perceiving colour and movement), emotion-valuation (liking and pleasure), and knowledge-meaning systems (personal significance). Barnaby and Dru have worked out how to make things that make people feel. It is the science of beautiful things: will this piece of art calm your nervous system and elevate your spirit? Then there is the ‘pleasure pathway’ – viewing ‘good’ art activates the same areas in the brain associated with being in love. So, I ask, if what you are making is hitting all the neuroaesthetic targets, how is the process working on you?
Dru says, “It’s made sense of all our experience.” They were both working in fashion when they met. Dru was in marketing and Barnaby was organising photographic shoots and writing fashion copy. They moved to Sydney for four years, where Barnaby became fashion editor of GQ Australia, but after a year, he burnt out. Dru is a good photographer, very good. But he was racing around promoting other people’s work. There was earning and living and launches and magazines and the scene and the clothes and the shoes and the watches. But it hollowed them out.
We pause our chat, listening to the birds. Robin and blackbird compete, singing at the tops of their voices. A woodpecker utters his cascading trill. Cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk-cuk. England made more sense than Australia. “It’s nearer the pulse of things,” says Dru. But he misses home. Especially in winter. He may have left his country behind, but from fashion to art is not a complete U-turn. What they learnt about selling luxury brands, they can apply to art. And they still like well-made luxury goods. “They have to be worth it,” says Barnaby. “I lust after an Omega Seamaster watch,” says Dru. Barnaby adds: “And me, a Savile Row suit.” It’s their thirst for the life at fashion’s high end which has died. “I need wild,” says Barnaby. “I want to work in the flow state. Too much news or poor sleep or a low mood decimates my day. Art for us is the freedom to be creative in the purest sense. It is not just about moving others. It has to make us feel first.” Here is that ‘breathing room for the spirit’ that art offers; it is here in the Sussex Downs and in Dru and Barnaby’s shared intention. They have set course and Providence is blowing fair winds into their sail.
Articulate, hardworking and in love with each other, these handsome men are a fashion editor’s dream. It would be easy to be cynical about Ash & Plumb’s modus operandi, if their work were not so good, nor they themselves not so disarming and so optimistically ‘up for it’ in a way that makes you want to jump on board. And wait until you see, smell and hold their work. Which you may not be able to do because it is wildly expensive, and probably you’ll only see it in a museum, where you won’t be able to touch it. They seem so open-hearted, they must want the widest possible audience to experience their work. “Of course,” says Dru. “Which is why we are contemplating doing a design range.”
In a sense, these sculptural vessels they make are holding the boys themselves. By chance, when Barnaby made a wooden tray out of elm burr, it cracked. They put it on Instagram and somebody wanted to buy it immediately. “It was a lightbulb moment for me. The humanity of a broken thing. It made sense, in alignment with our basic elemental embrace of imperfection. We are all imperfect.” They happened on the idea of mending things with tiny, drilled holes and leather stitches, which is Dru’s responsibility. The notion of visibly mending broken things, so beloved of the Japanese, where it is called kintsugi, speaks to both of them. “In a way it reflects the positives and negatives of history, as well as each one of us.” Things can be whole again, and after being mended, especially if you show the working, they are all the more beautiful for their cracks. Last year, Ash & Plumb did a blacksmithing course. “I’ve been making metal tools,” says Barnaby. “We’ll experiment with fire, iron, steel. I want to include metalwork mends in the wood pieces but we’re at the early stages.” Barnaby is thoughtful, serious. “My instinct is developing. Some pieces take days of just looking. We’ll discuss it in the morning, move something a millimetre, add something, then it will click. We know when it’s right.”
As I say goodbye, Barnaby shows me how the enormous Alfie loves to jump into his arms. Barnaby, a tall man, is hidden by dog.
How do you just buy a lathe and get your work put in a national museum?
Work hard and make beautiful things. Get a golden retriever. Oh, and believe in your dreams. Which is often more possible if somebody else believes in them too. Ash & Plumb’s process is a kind of alchemy; they are stronger together.