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
thinking always-trying appearance
I think that I'm always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see.
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.
winter snow childhood
Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.
design mapping plans
Design implies a sense of mapping something out and then you follow the plan.
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.
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.
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.
hands results persons
The things that I make are that which a person will make. They're not meant to mimic nature. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person.
interesting able sometimes
Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.
winter snow quality
Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality.
performers
I'm not a performer, in that I don't like the public, but I work in that respect.
blood light growth
Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.
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.
fall opportunity weather
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.