Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy
Andy Goldsworthy, OBEis a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist producing site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionSculptor
Date of Birth26 July 1956
rocks ice trying
As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.
simple filters lenses
My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays-integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit.
beautiful dangerous difficult
Nature, for me is raw and dangerous and difficult and beautiful and unnerving.
winter snow childhood
Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.
beach nature memories
There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things.
thinking race ice
There's a huge number of things that are occurring with the ice works which fascinate me enormously, but it's driven by this kind of frantic race against time. And whilst that creates a huge amount of tension and problems, it's a tension that I think I feed off.
cities people pavement
People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.
sleep thinking sculpture
I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment.
way able fortunate
I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do and live the way I do.
ice different pieces
When it does get below freezing and there is - it's cold enough for ice to form, then that changes the whole landscape, and it makes the landscape a different landscape to the one that I worked with previously. And I want to understand that. But the big tension of the ice works is that they're often made when it's cold enough to freeze one piece of ice to another.
country new-york people
Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit.
eye hands important
In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.
mean thinking artist
I'm an artist living in a small, Scottish village. So one would expect to be treated with some sort of caution. And the village and the farmers have shown enormous tolerance of me and interest in what I do. I mean, they don't necessarily understand what I'm doing all the time. But they, you know, I think they respect what I do and that there is a connection between what they do with the land and what I do, you know, that we're both dependent on weather and respond to that.
winter climate british
The British climate, although it is very wet, it is quite mild in winter. We don't get these severe - generally don't get severe winters.