Andy Goldsworthy Quotes & Sayings

There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things. — Andy Goldsworthy

If I had to describe my work in one word, that word would be time. — Andy Goldsworthy

I think I have been fashioned by the fickle weather of Britain that it is - it's forever changing. There's no kind of constant sun or dry weather or freezing weather, and I'm always having to change and adapt to that. — Andy Goldsworthy

I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue. — Andy Goldsworthy

Everything has the energy of its making inside it. — Andy Goldsworthy

When I'm working with materials it's not just the leaf or the stone, it's the processes that are behind them that are important. That's what I'm trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole. — Andy Goldsworthy

Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made. — Andy Goldsworthy

There's a huge number of things that are occurring with the ice works which fascinate me enormously, but it's driven by this kind of frantic race against time. And whilst that creates a huge amount of tension and problems, it's a tension that I think I feed off. — Andy Goldsworthy

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience. — Andy Goldsworthy

I have to understand the nature of change. And I cannot just work with stone or the more permanent materials. I need to work with leaves and ice and snow and mud and clay and water and the rising tide and the wind and all these. — Andy Goldsworthy

Fire is the origin of stone. By working the stone with heat, I am returning it to its source. — Andy Goldsworthy

I just see myself as an object in the final image. I know I'm experiencing it when I'm there working on it. I'm there to be worked with, as anything else that I work with. — Andy Goldsworthy

We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we've lost our connection to ourselves. — Andy Goldsworthy

My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, 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 expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit. — Andy Goldsworthy

I'm an artist living in a small, Scottish village. So one would expect to be treated with some sort of caution. And the village and the farmers have shown enormous tolerance of me and interest in what I do. I mean, they don't necessarily understand what I'm doing all the time. But they, you know, I think they respect what I do and that there is a connection between what they do with the land and what I do, you know, that we're both dependent on weather and respond to that. — Andy Goldsworthy

Nature, for me is raw and dangerous and difficult and beautiful and unnerving. — Andy Goldsworthy

Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality. — Andy Goldsworthy

Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather
rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm
is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there. — Andy Goldsworthy

The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red. — Andy Goldsworthy

Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form. — Andy Goldsworthy

One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die. — Andy Goldsworthy

Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next. — Andy Goldsworthy

The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below. — Andy Goldsworthy

It's just that when I work on someone else's land, it makes me aware of the social nature of that landscape. — Andy Goldsworthy

If you repeat something, it can become pointless. Some things can repeat and be endlessly fascinating. — Andy Goldsworthy

If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that. — Andy Goldsworthy

If I'm going to understand the land, I have to understand the wind, the snow, the rain, the leaves, the ice, and changes in temperature. It just reflects a reality for me. — Andy Goldsworthy

People also leave presence in a place even when they are no longer there. — Andy Goldsworthy

I take the opportunity each day offers. — Andy Goldsworthy

The first stone was just tried in the spirit of experimentation. The opening of the stone was far more interesting than the drawing that I had done on it. — Andy Goldsworthy

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood. — Andy Goldsworthy

Complete control can be the death of a work. — Andy Goldsworthy

We leave our presence in the pavement. We're walking over it, sitting on steps. — Andy Goldsworthy

The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it. — Andy Goldsworthy

Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private. — Andy Goldsworthy

It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt. — Andy Goldsworthy

Design implies a sense of mapping something out and then you follow the plan. — Andy Goldsworthy

I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful. — Andy Goldsworthy

I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture. — Andy Goldsworthy

My work comes first, reasons for it follow. — Andy Goldsworthy

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

My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people. — Andy Goldsworthy

Art is not a career - it's a life. — Andy Goldsworthy

The stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break. — Andy Goldsworthy

The main source of my income is through the commissions of the large-scale works and big sculptures, the projects. — Andy Goldsworthy

Sometimes you need to stop doing something to really see it afresh. — Andy Goldsworthy

The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material. — Andy Goldsworthy

When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance. — Andy Goldsworthy

Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured. — Andy Goldsworthy

I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball. — Andy Goldsworthy

I'm dealing with the most important things there are: life and nature. If this doesn't work, if this doesn't sustain me, I can't go back to nature. I'm right there. There's nowhere to go, and that frightens me. — Andy Goldsworthy

I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment. — Andy Goldsworthy

I have six acres in front of my own house, which I very rarely work on. Most of the work occurs on farmers' fields around me. And I like the discipline of working on other people's land. — Andy Goldsworthy

Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch. — Andy Goldsworthy

Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it. — Andy Goldsworthy

In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work. — Andy Goldsworthy

A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it. It is different than patience. It is not thinking. It is working with the rhythm. — Andy Goldsworthy

I think that I'm always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see. — Andy Goldsworthy

My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay. — Andy Goldsworthy

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement. — Andy Goldsworthy

As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone. — Andy Goldsworthy

At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient - only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete. — Andy Goldsworthy

Three or four stones in one firing will all react differently. I try to achieve a balance between those that haven't progressed enough and those about to go too far. — Andy Goldsworthy

When I do the permanent projects or the big projects, when a work is finished, that's the beginning of its life. — Andy Goldsworthy

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work. — Andy Goldsworthy

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside. — Andy Goldsworthy

The early firings contained many stones. — Andy Goldsworthy

A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels. — Andy Goldsworthy

I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do and live the way I do. — Andy Goldsworthy

Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There's something very powerful about finding snow in summer. — Andy Goldsworthy

Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things, otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work. — Andy Goldsworthy

People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city. — Andy Goldsworthy

Time confined into blind caves or extended through tunnels, responds to the call of infinity, which teases with its promise of freedom. outside the body, time is a pair of compasses in the hands of eternity, but inside it is a pendulum, fastened to the heart. the heart takes its measure from the lengthening swing of the pendulum surveying what time is left. in its own rhythm time spreads itself wildly here and there and is crippled elsewhere. its unequally distributed weight wounds my body - that is how the particularities of my life are manifest. — Andy Goldsworthy

Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned. — Andy Goldsworthy

Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit. — Andy Goldsworthy

Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature. — Andy Goldsworthy

The British climate, although it is very wet, it is quite mild in winter. We don't get these severe - generally don't get severe winters. — Andy Goldsworthy

There are occasions when I have moved boulders, but I'm reluctant to, especially ones that have been rooted in a place for many years. — Andy Goldsworthy

For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. — Andy Goldsworthy

It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store. — Andy Goldsworthy

Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear. — Andy Goldsworthy

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories. — Andy Goldsworthy

As you grow older you realize that art has an enormous effect. It's frightening sometimes to think of the effect that we can have. — Andy Goldsworthy

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born. — Andy Goldsworthy

The first snowball I froze was put in my mother's deep freeze when I was in my early 20s. — Andy Goldsworthy

Confrontation is something that I accept as part of the project though not its purpose. — Andy Goldsworthy

Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change. And in the case of some sculptures, time gives a patina to them. — Andy Goldsworthy

When I was at art school, a lot of art education is about art being a means of self-expression, and as an 18-year-old I didn't know if I had a huge amount I wanted to express. It was a big moment when I decided I wanted to shift the emphasis or the intention of my art from something I disgorged myself upon and something that actually fed me or made me see the world or understand the world. — Andy Goldsworthy

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space. — Andy Goldsworthy

The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone. — Andy Goldsworthy

Understanding the materials I work with ... gives me a deeper understanding of my place. And it's helped me make sense of the changes that are happening to me as I grow older. — Andy Goldsworthy

If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different. — Andy Goldsworthy

The things that I make are that which a person will make. They're not meant to mimic nature. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person. — Andy Goldsworthy

I've laid down in dried up streambeds, leaving a shadow. And then, five minutes later, it's flash flooded, and where I once laid is now running water, which would've washed me away, you know? There's that power and danger often in places that look so calm and pastoral to begin with. — Andy Goldsworthy

I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames. — Andy Goldsworthy

The main reason I went to digital was because I got time-lapse, video, and still images all in one camera. Having a minimal amount of gear is really important for someone who wants to walk around. That allowed me to have this flexibility to document things in different ways. — Andy Goldsworthy

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree. — Andy Goldsworthy

I did tests on small stones before collecting and committing myself to the larger ones. — Andy Goldsworthy

It's art that's taught me to think and to write. — Andy Goldsworthy

I'm not a performer, in that I don't like the public, but I work in that respect. — Andy Goldsworthy