Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features    
Subject:   20th Century  

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.

The artist has lived in the rolling valleys of southern Scotland for many years, and he works in the landscape there, every day, whenever he is at home – which is not as often as he would like, thanks to the numerous international commissions and projects which now regularly come his way, with steadily increasing recognition. He has worked all over the world, including as far afield as the North Pole –  where he greatly expanded his repertoire of techniques for working with ice and snow –  and was recently invited to design a monumental, permanent installation for the grand atrium of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. But nothing made him more nervous than the commission from his local village in Dumfriesshire, to construct one of his distinctive sandstone cairns on a nearby hilltop, as a permanent celebration of the new millennium. Some jottings from his diary, dated 23 December 1999, vividly convey his fears: “I feel self-conscious about working so prominently in my home place. I will see the resulting sculpture whenever I leave and return to the village. My children will grow up with it. These associations can become rich and beautiful, but if the sculpture does not work I shall have to live with that.” The resulting work, an egg-shaped menhir shaped from layers of rust-red sandstone blocks, still stands on a hill above the road into Penpont. It recalls a primitive wayside standing stone, intended to invoke the protection of some ancient deity, like a guardian spirit.

Goldsworthy’s work often has such atavistic associations and although he may not quite be a primitivist his art does seem to seek a form of reconnection to the most ancient, diurnal rhythms of natural existence. He enjoys being in the same place through all the different seasons and making sculptures that respond to each of those seasons as purely as possible. In spring and summer he may work with the lightest, springiest and elusive materials of plant growth; in autumn with the intense colour of leaves; in winter with stones. In that sense his works distantly resemble modern equivalents to the medieval book of hours, organised by the month. His principal regret would seem to be the way in which the constant lure of travel has disrupted this particular aspect of his work. “I’m an artist whose art is about change, and I believe that change is best understood by staying in one place. Although the travelling I’ve been able to do has been fantastic, it does mean I have forfeited the sense of change to a certain extent. When you travel, you see difference, not change.”

Goldsworthy insists on keeping an archive of absolutely everything that he has ever made, the good, the bad and the ugly, in a large filing cabinet in his studio which contains sheet after sheet of slides, documenting thousand upon thousand of his artful interventions in the landscape. He says he likes to learn from his mistakes: “In fact at some point I’d like to make an exhibition about my failures. Some of them are failures just because they fall to bits but others are failures because they are just awful sculptures, really awful sculptures. I make some hideous, dreadful sculptures. The things I use, like leaves, petals, flowers, these are difficult things to deal with as a contemporary sculptor, tough things to deal with and see as they are. So I do fail miserably at times, and the work comes out slight and decorative. It fails because it hasn’t penetrated the material. But every so often I get beyond the surface appearance…”

The precarious nature of Goldsworthy’s work is symbolised by the front and back covers of his new book, which constitute a “before” and “after” view of a particular sculpture, the characteristically descriptive title of which is “Elm bark / covered with leaves / supported by stones / over a waterfall.” In the first picture, four startlingly bright irregular yellow forms hover, seemingly miraculously, like a distillation of vivid autumnal colour, above a torrent of water. The second picture shows the same shapes but battered and from a distance, having been eroded by the water’s swift passage – a post-mortem view of the sculpture, swept to its ruin. “Sometimes a sculpture can last for days,” he says, “other times just a few minutes, or even seconds. I will often spend ages making something that doesn’t work at all.”

The frustrations of working in this way, he implies, are more than compensated for by the rewards. He defines the aim behind all of his work as “seeing what’s there, what’s really there, in a particular place at a particular time - whether  it’s the colours or the forms in a landscape, or something else. The intention is to get in deeper and deeper.” The idea that he might ever get bored, that he might ever tire of the exigencies of twig-bending, or sticking leaves to rain-wettened boulders in intricate arrangements, seems to strike him as both quaint and improbable. “There are so many ways of looking at a stone or a branch or a leaf and each piece is another way of looking at that material. There’s always this sense of going in and looking, and learning.”

The process is often unpredictable and the results frequently surprise the artist himself. A few years ago he made a work with the carcass of a flyblown dead sheep that he found in the hollow of a field near his home – unlike Damien Hirst, Goldsworthy does not order his animal carcases fresh-killed but waits for nature to deliver – and created a vortex-like “drawing” of twisted plant stems around its fallen form. He wondered why he had been drawn to adorn a dead sheep in quite that way and then realised that what he had made was an echo of the great buzzing whirl of flies in the air above the carcass. These days, dead sheep are not so easy to find,  and he wonders if government paranoia about hygiene in the coiuntryside is partly responsible. “Everything has to be cleaned up, especially death,” he says with evident regret. There is perhaps  an unstated, proselytising intention behind what he does – the desire to create an art that might act as an antidote to the shrink-wrapped, pre-packed quality of so much contemporary experience.

In recent years, Goldsworthy has found himself increasingly drawn, in the autumn months, to the bright yellow leaves of the elm trees growing along a riverbank at the bottom of a nearby field. “The gorgeousness of the yellow elm has to be seen in the context of a tree that is disappearing from the landscape because of Dutch Elm Disease. I work in this little stream that is not far from here, bordered by dead and dying elms, and there is less of the yellow to work with each year. As they die, each autumn’s yellow becomes less, and it’s paralleled by the yellow disappearing from the landscape completely. It’s the most powerful, rich yellow that I get here in Scotland. It can veer towards a pastel, can have a greenness to it, but to get the true yellow at its most intense is quite difficult. The leaves have to be found at the right time. There are trees I know that go more yellow than others and there’s one that I know where it will extend all the way into December. There’s such a tension and fragility and precariousness about that yellow. You can see an energy rising into the colour, it’s a tangible expression of nature’s energy. One or two very cold nights will knock it off just like that and then it’s gone, the yellow’s gone. And that’s the equivalent, for me, of someone going into a painter’s studio and taking their yellow. That’s how it feels. I no longer have that colour and there’s this huge sense of absence, shock, loss, deep sadness, when it’s gone.”

Some of Goldsworthy’s most striking recent works were created using that yellow – vivid examples of what he means when he says that he is trying to get to the heart of something in nature, to isolate some quintessence of its energy and colour. Yet Goldsworthy also acknowledges that he, like any artist, cannot avoid bringing himself into his work to a certain degree. He and his wife separated a couple of years ago – she still lives nearby and their four children divide their time between the two households – a  period of his life that he remembers as a time of “chaos”. Looking back on the work that he did then, especially the fragile image on the cover of Passage, he seems as struck by its emotional as its formal structure. “A lot of those works were made by floating forms – like those pieces of elm bark, covered in elm leaves – over the turmoil of the river, as if trying to hold on to some kind of stability against this backdrop that was really in turmoil. It wasn’t self-conscious. All I can remember is that I became really attached to working in that way, at a particular waterfall, during that time.”

Looking at the piece in question, after the interview was over, I noticed, idly, that the four raft-like forms he had suspended over the chaos of the rushing water also happens to correspond to the number of his children. Maybe that is pushing the private significance of the piece too far; maybe not. Goldsworthy does not much like talking about the more intimate dimensions of his art, describing it as “a very dodgy area” and stressing that most of the time “the whole effort is to make sure that the last thing people think about when they look at it is me. What I’m after is to make something that should look as if no effort has gone into it at all, all my effort, the blood, sweat and energy, goes to make it look as if it’s just effortlessly there.” Nevertheless, at a time when so many contemporary artists seem to approach the subject of their own intentions with such excruciating, career-watching caginess, there is something distinctly refreshing about Goldsworthy’s openness – his willingness at least to acknowledge the buried presence, in some of his work, of good old-fashioned human emotions. And the work itself certainly seems no weaker for the feelings, whatever they may be, that have compelled it.