Andy Goldsworthy: In contact with materials, I can see so much more wi...

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

separation connections nature

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

work-out lasts important

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

keys weather art

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

nature memories beach

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

collapse balance beautiful

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

Andy Goldsworthy

difficult dangerous beautiful

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

rocks independent rain

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

Andy Goldsworthy

one-word ifs would-be

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.

Andy Goldsworthy

childhood winter snow

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

trying lying art

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

growth time giving

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

rocks sticks want

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

landscape something-new dying

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

successful heart looks

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

sculpture sleep thinking

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 realization. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.

Andy Goldsworthy

differences would-be ideas

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

mean art school

Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.

Andy Goldsworthy

growth light blood

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

results persons hands

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

opportunity weather fall

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.