A HUNT has been launched to find the 365 axeheads carved by an artist who died 16 years ago which triggered the purchase of Scotland’s – and the UK’s – first community woodland.

Sculptor and furniture maker Tim Stead carved a wooden axehead for each day of 1986 to raise funds to buy what became the following year Wooplaw Community Woodland in the Scottish Borders.

Thirty years later the search is on for the unique mementoes which have gone around Scotland and possibly the world. The hunt coincides with the launch of the Tim Stead Trust, which was formed to preserve Blainslie, his home in the Borders, for the nation.

The trust wants anyone who has one of the axeheads to register it on the Axes for Trees website at timsteadtrust.org/axesfortrees – noting the wood it is made from, how it came to be in their possession and where it has been, along with any pictures.

The target is to find at least 200 of the “lost” axeheads and tell their stories.

Stead’s son Sam said: “In a way it’s keeping my father’s name alive. Each of the 365 axeheads is unique. Each has been labelled with a day of the year and the type of hardwood from which it is made and signed by Tim. The fact that the axehead is made out of wood, not metal, appealed to my father’s sense of irony and the poet in him.”

However, the final words on the axeheads belong to the artist himself: “The axe-head is something which I’ve always liked. It’s a most beautiful shape and something which links form and function perfectly.

“The axe has been used by man for millions of years – it’s a very early tool, one which is used with rhythm, rather than the chain-saw which is much more destructive.”

Stead made furniture for galleries, castles, cathedrals and even for Pope John Paul II for his visit to Edinburgh’s Murrayfield stadium in 1981, yet it was the untutored response of ordinary people that gave him most pleasure. People delighted in the warm honesty of his work.

Three of his most powerful pieces relate to architecture. The refurbishment of the oldest part of the Kirk of St Nicholas in Aberdeen was dedicated to those who lost their lives over the course of 25 years of the North Sea oil industry.

His rood screen and furniture for the North Sea Oil Industries Memorial Chapel there was commissioned in 1989, a year after the Piper Alpha disaster, which had spurred the North Sea Industries into marking the achievements and recognising the human cost of that period. The initial letters of the woods used in the chair backs spell out the simple but poignant: “We remember yew.”

The screen separates the chapel wing from the rest of the kirk. The rood screen with its double-doors and vertically adjustable slats resembles the trees of a forest, and the pipes of a church organ.

At the Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, which opened in 1996, Stead made Peephole, an extraordinary tiny space from which people could spy into the gallery below.

For the Millennium Clock Tower in the Royal Museum, Edinburgh, Stead collaborated with Edouard Bersudsky of Sharmanka Kinetic Theatre, Annica Sandström of Lindean Mill Glass and Jurgen Tübbecke of Peebles. Its hourly eruption of movement, sound and magic has proved an exciting and popular event.