Date: 18-08-2002
Owning Institution: Courtesy Andy Goldsworthy
Publication:         Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:       Now    

The third of this month’s summer pictures shows part of an extensive “landscape intervention” by the contemporary sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Chalk Stones Trail consists of fourteen large chalk stones excavated from a quarry in West Sussex, chiselled roughly into rounds by the artist and then placed – a little like the way-stones which once helped to guide travellers – at strategic points along a circuit of public footpaths just off the South Downs Way. Anyone wishing to encounter all 14 of Goldsworthy’s chalk stones will have to walk a route of about five miles, from the bus stop at Cocking Hill to West Dean College. Maps are available from Pallant House Gallery in nearby Chichester, where Goldsworthy’s project was initiated. The walk takes about two and a half hours – three and a half hours or more if, like me, you happen to get totally lost.

Goldsworthy is an artist who creates his sculptures exclusively from natural materials. He has worked in the past with (among other things) leaves, twigs, stones, mud, earth and ice. Many of his creations are ephemeral, some lasting for no longer than a few hours, or even minutes, and are preserved only in the form of photographs. Certain common threads run through all of his activities. He is interested in bringing out the inherent qualities of the materials with which he works, rather than going against the grain of their nature. He also likes, where he can, to enliven his audience’s responses to the places in which his sculptures are sited: to reveal overlooked aspects of the landscape, or to light upon a hidden genius loci.

A hidden or easily overlooked aspect of the Sussex landscape was on Goldsworthy’s mind when he conceived the Chalk Stones Trail. “What fascinates me about the Sussex chalkland,” he explains, “is simply the fact that there is such a mass of chalk just beneath the surface of the land. It’s the bedrock of the land here, and yet it’s so hidden most of the time. You have to dig for it. Digging into the ground and finding it – digging around for an idea, so to speak – set me thinking. For me chalk has always had mythical, magical properties. Coming from the North, from the Scottish borders, as I do, the idea of digging a hole and finding it white seems totally contradictory. It runs against all my ideas about what is under the ground. Dig a hole up North and and it’s black and stony and dark and earthy. So to dig a hole in Sussex and find chalk, so absolutely pristine and pure and white, I felt it was like finding the sky in the ground.”

Perhaps, somewhere in the back of his mind, he had the example of those extraordinary folk drawings, such as the so-called “Cerne Abbas Giant”, carved out of the landscape of the coastal downs. But he did not want to create an image so much as engineer a series of surprises. “I wanted to play on the fact that something which belongs absolutely to the landscape can, when you bring it to the surface, feel so absolutely alien. I wanted these perfectly white boulders, placed in the green summer landscape, to look as though they might have landed from above – fallen from Mars or somewhere.” Although the existence of the sculptures has been announced, although there are leaflets and guides to the route along which they lie, Goldsworthy also likes the idea of people coming across them, quite by chance, and wondering what on earth they might be. “I love the thought of someone being baffled, wondering whether a local farmer might have done something strange; and then coming on another, and another, and gradually becoming absorbed by the enigma of them.”

There is something pleasantly childlike about the activity of following Goldsworthy’s trail, which is an Easter egg hunt of sorts, and the boulders themselves seem calculated to evoke a range of fairly direct and childlike responses to their sheer peculiarity. At first sight, until closer inspection has proved otherwise, they look very much like huge balls of snow (even stranger than it might otherwise be, in midsummer). But each manages to have a different character, depending on where it has been placed. Some have been placed in thick undergrowth by the artist, or have been half-hidden in dells or groves, like marbles forgotten by some absent-minded giant. One has been used to stop a gap in a hedgerow, as if to serve purely practical purpose. The largest one of all occupies the great sweep of landscape stretching up towards the Downs from the front of elegant West Dean Park. Surrounded by grazing sheep, it looks both wonderfully out of place and faintly parodic, rather like a spoof on all those artfully located Henry Moores in tranquil parkland settings.

Like most of Goldsworthy’s work, the Chalk Stone Trail will change with time, sinking gently back into the landscape which it occupies. Planning permission has been granted for them to remain in situ for two years, after which they will have to be removed. But perhaps no one will feel, by then, that it is necessary. “Chalk discolours with time,” the artist explains. “After the summer, when they get rained on, they will very soon go green and darken. They will be like lights gradually going dim.”