In certain contemporary art circles it is fashionable to take a frostily dismissive view of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Now in his late forties, he is an artist who works with the materials of the land, using anything from mud and water to twigs, leaves and stones to create sculptures of such fragility that many only survive in the form of photographs recording their brief and evanescent appearance. His detractors argue that although his work can be striking and ingenious, he is, in truth, a mere latecomer to the field, a derivative follower in the footsteps of first-generation British Land Artists such as Richard Long. According to another commonly voiced preconception, his work lacks substance and depth. It is just decoration, mere craft, a kind of knitting or raffia-work, albeit done with latticed twigs or autumn leaves stitched together with stalks, expressing little more than a fuzzy sense of solidarity with the politics of the green movement.
Goldsworthy’s new exhibition, by far his biggest and most ambitious to date, is a stirring reproof to those who continue to doubt his seriousness and talent. The show was created to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the
The artist has created work both for the landscape of the park itself and for its several impressive gallery spaces – creating an exhibition best experienced as a walk, a trail of discovery, punctuated by a succession of marvellous surprises. It begins in the principal underground galleries of the
