icicles from Rivers & Tides © Andy Goldsworthy
Using an endless range of natural materials—snow, ice, flowers, leaves, icicles, mud, pine-cones, stones, twigs, thorns, bark, rock, clay, feathers, petals, twigs—Andy Goldsworthy creates outdoor artwork that is usually transient and disappear shortly after creation. Just before they disappear, he takes photographs of his work.
This post is an attempt to reflect on what I believe to be Andy’s intense “desire to know” through thirty years of work, photography, quotes, and approach to life. All artwork is courtesy of Andy Goldsworthy.
Click any video below to watch. More than a hundred unique work of Andy. His quotes and related links are below the videos. Enjoy!
What are your thoughts? Share what you think in the comment section below.
- Will to know:
“Each time a work collapses, I get to know the stone a little bit better. My work grows in proportion to my understanding of the stone.”
“My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.” —Andy Goldsworthy
- Endurance and fluidity:
“A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it. It is different than patience. It is not thinking. It is working with the rhythm.” —Andy Goldsworthy
- Embracing uncertainty and taking risks to discover possibilities:
“When I make a work I often take it to the very edge of its collapse and that’s very beautiful balance. There is an intensity about a work at its peak when the work is most alive.”—Andy Goldsworthy
- Forfeiting the right of possession:
Saw last bit of snow from flat window.
Collected snow – made ball
Carried into wood – heavy
Long way – dripping wet.
Went back to see how it was getting on
- mainly to see it melt to nothing
- As I was leaving a man came – I hurried across
Got there just in time to see him kick it in stream.
- Hurt.
Didn’t say anything – outside
I forfeit the right of possession. —Andy Goldsworthy
- Raw, real, and intense:
“I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn’t walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.” —Andy Goldsworthy
- Collaboration with his environment:
“For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches.” —Andy Goldsworthy
- Ephemeral and transient state of mind:
“At its most successful, my touch looks into the heart of nature; most days I don’t even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I can’t understand unless my touch is also transient-only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete. I can’t explain the importance to me of being part of the place, its seasons and changes.” —Andy Goldsworthy
- Change is part of life:
“What is here to stay and what isn’t? Each work grows, strays, decays—integral parts of a cycle. Process and decay are implicit. I have become aware of raw nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather”
“Often I can only follow a train of thought while a particular weather condition persists. When a change comes, the idea must alter or it will, and often does, fail. I am sometimes left stranded by a change in the weather with half-understood feelings that have to travel with me until conditions are right for them to appear.” —Andy Goldsworthy
- The part leads to the whole:
“All forms are to be found in nature, and there are many qualities within any material. By exploring them I hope to understand the whole. My work needs to include the loose and disordered within the nature of material as well as the tight and regular.”—Andy Goldsworthy
- Respect to his surrounding:
“There are occasions when I have moved boulders, but I’m reluctant to, especially ones that have been rooted in a place for many years.” —Andy Goldsworthy
- Living through experience:
“Ideas must be put to the test. That’s why we make things; otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realization. I’ve had what I thought were great ideas that just didn’t work.” —Andy Goldsworthy
- Refraining from uprooting his creations from their natural ground:
“The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and the space within. The weather—rain, sun, snow, hail, calm—is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings and the way it sits tells how it came to be there. In an effort to understand why that rock is there and where it is going, I must work with it in the area in which I found it.”—Andy Goldsworthy
Related:
- Video collection about Andy.
- My personal favorites.
- Rivers and Tides – A beautiful documentary about Andy
- Time, Passage, Enclosure, wood, and more.
- Large collection of his work.
- Music in the videos above from Divinities By Ian Anderson.
