Since the spring of 2005, the surroundings of St Lucia chapel near the village of Berdún, have been home to the wooden sculptural work by the Welsh artist David Nash entitled “Three Sun Vessels for Huesca”. The gigantic sun dial is made of a wind rose and three huge sculptures made in oak from southeast England placed at the cardinal points of East, West and South. This piece of work forms part of the project Art and Nature that the Provincial Government of Huesca developed during the first decade of the 21st century.

The chapel of St Lucia is used twice a year, coinciding with the spring and autumn equinoxes. At those two moments of the year, the sun is in an identical position on both the Eastern and Western horizons. In this game between light and the passage of time designed by the Welsh artist, the vessel on the southern side has a vertical slot through which the midday sun shines. Every day of the year this is at a slightly different angle. In Berdún, midday is at 12:50 in winter and at 13:50 in summer.

David Nash is one of the founders of the “Land-Art” movement that came into being in England at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Nash is described by critics as an “experimental artist, with a singular tendency to the incomplete and open, including natural processes in his work. He is associated with the nature-art movement, in which artistic pieces relate in such a way with nature that they create new spaces”.

It is therefore no coincidence that the “Three Sun Vessels for Huesca” are made of wood. David Nash admits that for him, wood is “an organic material, with a life of its own, which is also subject to the passage of time”. This is why, with time, the Vessels will change over the years, as the wood darkens until it gains a silvery grey hue. With this in mind, David Nash stakes a claim for “a life more in tune with nature, far from the rush and roar of our modern society”.