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
rain reality ice
If I'm going to understand the land, I have to understand the wind, the snow, the rain, the leaves, the ice, and changes in temperature. It just reflects a reality for me.
ice wind snow
I have to understand the nature of change. And I cannot just work with stone or the more permanent materials. I need to work with leaves and ice and snow and mud and clay and water and the rising tide and the wind and all these.
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.
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.
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.
origin
Fire is the origin of stone. By working the stone with heat, I am returning it to its source.
acceptable breaking fact familiar hammer response stone violent
Breaking stone with a hammer is a familiar and acceptable way of working the material, but is in fact a more violent response than firing.
sites walked
I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball.
far spirit tried
The first stone was just tried in the spirit of experimentation. The opening of the stone was far more interesting than the drawing that I had done on it.
art past years
One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
art thinking aging
As you grow older you realize that art has an enormous effect. It's frightening sometimes to think of the effect that we can have.
land discipline people
I have six acres in front of my own house, which I very rarely work on. Most of the work occurs on farmers' fields around me. And I like the discipline of working on other people's land.
journey snow quality
It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store.
stones firing
The early firings contained many stones.