Andy Goldsworthy is a refreshingly down-to-earth sculptor, so much so that he is happy to spend weeks on end up to his knees in mud if a particular piece of work requires it. Slim, wiry, with a complexion slightly ruddied by years spent working out of doors, and with a prominent, albeit somewhat time-smudged, tattoo on his left forarm, he looks more like most people’s idea of a farm labourer than a chic contemporary artist. In fact on this particular rainswept autumnal Scottish afternoon, as he poses self-consciously for the Sunday Telegraph's photographer, in front of one of the outbuildings of the farm that is his home and studio, the scene distantly recalls one of those Fast Show take-offs of a fashion-shoot – the skits where a mud-spattered farmer emerges from a shed, stands before camera and pronounces on the coming trends in  men’s wear: “This season, oi shall mostly be wearin’ green wellies and weatherproofs.”

Goldsworthy has made good use of his own wellies and weatherproofs. He has spent some twenty-six years working the land, after his own idiosyncratic fashion, making a multitude of mostly ephemeral sculptures from such unpromising materials as twigs, grass, wool, straw, water, snow, ice, earth, petals, leaves, boulders and thorns. His works survive, for the most part, in the form of the photographs which he takes to record them, before they are reabsorbed by nature. The ones which please him are sold in editions of only one (in order, he says, to preserve the integrity of each original outdoor piece as a single work of art, insofar as that is possible). The same photographs are also gathered together in the books which he periodically publishes. The latest of these covetable volumes, Passage, comes out at the end of next month.

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