Chance Encounters, Edition 61
Andy Goldsworthy: Working with Nature
In the frigid predawn landscape, a man approaches a sheltered waterfall. He had come earlier in the winter but the icicles were too small for the sculpture he was hoping to create. Now he gets to work, breaking off large icicles, dipping their ends in water and holding them together until they freeze in place. Sometimes he uses a forked stick to hold the pieces in place as his creation grows. To remove the sticks, he must breathe gently on the points where they are frozen to the icicle. He works deliberately but feels the pressure of time. His goal is to complete his construction as the sun rises, hoping to photograph the moment the morning sun strikes the sculpture. If he is too slow to finish, the warming air will undo his careful work.
Each work grows, stays, 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 expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit. – Andy Goldsworthy
The resulting photograph of a sunlit starburst of icicles is probably the most reproduced of Andy Goldsworthy’s artworks. The artist (British, b. 1956) has been working in and with nature for fifty years, creating both ephemeral and permanent sculptures all over the world. In all of his works, Goldsworthy explores the relationship between humans and their environment, with special attention to the effects of time. The artist is working in the tradition of Land Art or Environmental Art which began in the 1960s. Inspired by surviving earthworks and megaliths from prehistoric Europe and indigenous cultures around the world, many of the early Land artists worked on a monumental scale, some, like Michael Heizer (City, 1972-2022) and James Turrell (Roden Crater Project, 1979-ongoing), spending decades on massive projects.
As a young artist, Goldsworthy’s efforts were on a smaller scale, often focused on making subtle changes to the environment. Such works had highly descriptive titles which describe how they were created and frequently mention the weather. When working on an intimate scale, the artist refrains from using any tools beyond his own hands and rough tools collected on the site. Stiff stems and small twigs serve to poke tiny holes to sew with grass stalks. Found sticks support works in progress. One stone can be used as a hammer to break another or as a stylus to scrape a design or change the color of stones. This work from 1986 bears the title
Horse chestnut tree torn hole stitched around the edge with grass stalks moving in the wind Trinity College, Cambridge 24 July 1986
From a distance, the artist’s intervention in the tree seems to be just another gap in the dense leaves, and it takes a closer look to find Goldsworthy’s torn hole. As time passes, the grass sewing the leaves together will break or fall out and only the photograph will remain to testify to the work’s existence.
If I’m going to work with the nature of things, things change, and things die, and things are mortal. Really, it just reflects what life and nature is. – Andy Goldsworthy
I discovered Goldsworthy’s works when I saw two photographs from a 1985 project he executed in Japan. The first work showed a thin string of bright red leaves floating in a stream. Like the horse chestnut leaves, they were sewn together with grass. The second photograph, taken the day after the first, was the one above. The chain had gathered in a still pool and the artist used a ring of woven briar to create a hole in the center. The contrast between the geometric circle and the natural irregularities of the leaves and stones is striking. Holes are a recurring motif in Goldsworthy’s art. He finds looking in deep holes unnerving, sensing the presence of nature’s powerful energies. For the artist, the black holes in his sculptures make those energies visible. Goldsworthy has surrounded holes with many materials: colorful leaves, driftwood, stone, bracken, and ice; each color and texture creates a different effect but the central void remains.
Another recurring motif in Goldsworthy’s art is the line or path. This colorful example is made of dandelions running through a patch of bluebells. This particular project required the artist to mix multiple materials, dandelion, rosebay willow herb stalks, and forked sticks to achieve the effect he had envisioned. When the artist first contemplated this sculpture, the dandelions hadn’t yet grown large enough; by the time they had, the bluebells were almost past their prime. When nature is your collaborator, you are at its mercy. Goldsworthy welcomes the uncertainty that comes with his approach as it forces him to become enmeshed in the rhythms of nature. The goal is not to dominate nature but to highlight its characteristics, its vulnerability, and its power.
As the artist’s reputation grew, he traveled widely, creating installations indoors and out. Goldsworthy came to see that nature existed in towns and cities and not just in the rural landscapes where he had honed his ideas. In Poppies, he threaded a line of red poppy flowers down an old Spanish stairway. The line the artist created suggests the traces of a journey someone or something has taken through the space. Vivid red is a color he has found and used in works made all over the world, describing it as “a vein running through the earth” which connects one place with another, so that they share the same energy no matter how far apart.
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, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made. – Andy Goldsworthy
This version of the line appears in Goldsworthy’s current exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh (through November 2, 2025). Like Poppies, Wool Runner extends down a staircase, this one inside the Academy building. The artist has been working with wool for the last decade or so, picking up loose strands and clumps of wool caught in fences, streams, and brush in fields. To create the runner, Goldsworthy and his assistants have pinned clumps, strips and patches of wool to a wire grid using thorns, another path voyaging through its setting. The source of the colors on the wool is the paint that farmers in Scotland use to identify the ownership of sheep. The artist considers the exhibition as installed in Edinburgh to be a unified work, though it is made up of both new pieces and examples from Goldsworthy’s earlier career. At the top of the staircase, Fence (2025), a barbed wire sculpture is visible. The architecture of the Academy building allows viewers to encounter surprising interactions between Goldsworthy’s works.
My work made indoors or with urban and industrial materials is an attempt to discover nature in these things also. – Andy Goldsworthy
In the 1990s, Goldsworthy began to work with dry stone construction, learning from and working with master masons to construct cairns, small buildings, and walls. The artist has been commissioned to build several walls in the United States, including at Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, New York, in 1997-1998; the Nelson-Atkins Art Museum, Kansas City, Missouri, in 2019, and Stanford University, California, in 2001 (above). When the artist receives a commission for a permanent installation, he visits the location, familiarizing himself with the site and beginning to imagine its possibilities. For Stone River at Stanford University, Goldsworthy chose a depression near the school’s Cantor Arts Center. Like many of the artist’s walls, Stone River has a serpentine form, a motif which the artist had been exploring in a variety of materials for decades. Goldsworthy has observed that the snake-like form recurs in nature, in the ridges of a mountain range, the roots of trees, and the meander of a river. Even line works like Dandelion flowers, above, meander slightly due to the terrain and the irregularities of the materials. In works like Stone River, the artist exaggerates and compresses the bends of a river and ends the wall in a pointed element that seems to emerge from or disappear into the ground. With its triangular top and wedge profile, this work suggests the back of an eel, snake, or dragon.
I need to work in a wide range of scale, reflecting what I find in nature. Working small with grasses or leaves is a strain. A sudden gust, a hungry robin, even a worm can cause collapse. I enjoy these delicate tensions, but they cause an occasional need to work large and physically hard. One scale releases energy for the other. – Andy Goldsworthy
In keeping with Goldsworthy’s longstanding practice, he wanted to use a local and locally meaningful material for Stone River. One can imagine how excited he was to discover the “boneyard” of local sandstone collected from earthquake-damaged campus buildings. The artist described how he imagined rivers eroding sand from the region’s mountains, sand which became stone, which was turned into buildings, which returned to the ground after the earthquakes of 1906 and 1989, only to be reconstructed as the Stone River. The artist foresees the wall weathering and changing over time until it returns to the earth again. Though the walls and other architectural commissions seem permanent, Goldsworthy knows from his long experience of working in nature that nothing lasts forever.
Some of Goldsworthy’s more recent works attempt to renew the cycle of growth and decay while continuing his traditional sculptural and formal practices. Split Oak Wood utilizes a cone form that the artist has previously constructed in ice, wood, and stone. In this case, the artist and colleagues gathered wind-fallen oak branches, stripped the bark from them, and cut them into workable lengths. The cone was constructed between two sides of an oak tree that had fallen, appearing almost as if the tree had produced an egg. Eventually, of course, the fallen tree and the cone built of branches will decay, but the artist has planted acorns from local oaks all around the fallen tree and the sculpture so that as the old tree decays, the new trees will cover the space it occupied.
What is important to me is that at the heart of whatever I do are a growing understanding and a sharpening perception of the land. – Andy Goldsworthy
Video introduction to Andy Goldsworthy l Fifty Years exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy, through November 2, 2025, produced by the National Galleries of Scotland.
Goldsworthy’s ephemeral and permanent works allow us to understand many aspects of nature. For the artist, understanding nature for himself was always an underlying goal of his collaboration with the landscapes in which he worked. When I first encountered his art, I was enamored of the whimsicality of creating ephemeral works from colorful leaves, sticks, stones, and ice. Then I watched Thomas Riedelsheimer’s 2001 film Andy Goldsworthy – Rivers and Tides and I was astounded by the patience and determination of this man who tramped through muddy fields, stood in icy water, and built on unstable sand. If his construction collapsed, he started over again. Though I know there were days when the artist grew impatient and frustrated, he never abandoned the path he had chosen, to reach beyond the surface of nature to understand its rhythms, and then collaborate with its energy.
Current exhibition:
Andy Goldsworthy l Fifty Years, Royal Scottish Academy, The Mound, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK, through November 2, 2025 https://www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/andy-goldsworthy-fifty-years#highlighted-artworks
Additional resources:
Hanging Stones, Rosedale, North Yorkshire, England, UK, art installation site. https://hangingstones.org/
Andy Goldsworthy l Rivers and Tides, dir. Thomas Riedelsheimer (2001)
Leaning Into the Wind – Andy Goldsworthy, dir. Thomas Riedelsheimer (2017)
The artist has also published numerous books presenting photographs of his projects.
Thank you for reading. Please like, share, and comment. I’ll be back soon with more art.
My first favorite artist. I remember being at a party in Portland, Oregon in the early 90s where there was a book of his work; being a bit of an introvert, I opened the book and was immediately enthralled. I've been a massive fan of his practice ever since. He has such a deeply spiritual and animist way of working and it shines though.