Get challenged and have ideas

Goldsworthy working with leaves from local elm trees.Photograph by Nicholas J.R. White for The New Yorker

 NYer article about my favorite artist, Andy Goldsworthy. Article "A Landscape Artist in Winter"

Highlights:

The environment was Goldsworthy’s true studio. He makes art using natural materials—stacked stones, interlaced leaves, threaded wool—that might take hours to create and then only moments to evanesce.

Such commissions can take Goldsworthy away from Scotland for months at a time, and during his travels he yearns to be nearer to his source of inspiration. “Change is best understood by staying in the same place, and it takes a while before you really get to see and understand change,” he told me, the first time I visited him in Penpont. “When you travel, you see differences, but not really change, so being in the same place is important for me—seeing kids being born and grow up, and people dying. I remember there was a pretty stern old lady who used to walk through the streets when I moved here, and when my oldest son was born I said to her, ‘Look, Jamie’s the first child to be born on the street for twenty-three years.’ And she said, ‘You see only births, and I see only deaths.’ ”

“For me, the landscape is not a place you go to for therapy and relaxation—it is to get challenged and have ideas, and to generate thoughts and feelings and emotions,” he told me. “It’s a very powerful thing to deal with.”

The jobs he took on farms, starting around the age of thirteen, taught him skills that have since served him well. “There is a hugely underestimated intelligence attached to manual labor,” he told me. “When you use your own energy, your own body, you have to be economical about how you do it. If you’re picking potatoes all day, or picking stones, you are working repetitively. You have to work with a rhythm and a fluidity, and you can’t be fighting it or forcing it. That’s really important for what I do as an artist—if you work with the right flow and rhythm, you give the work that rhythm.” 

Among the large-scale works in the “Fifty Years” show was a project called “Red Flags,” which was originally displayed outside Rockefeller Center, in 2020. Fifty white flags were stained with reddish earth retrieved from each American state, with the intention of highlighting what unifies the fractious nation, not what divides it. “It is an anti-flag project in many ways,” Goldsworthy has explained.

He gets infuriated when U.K. officials designate locations like Rosedale as protected “tranquil places,” particularly when such regulations slow down or thwart his artistic conceptions. “I guess these are areas where foxes can’t eat rabbits, and people can’t shout, and it shouldn’t rain,” he said, scornfully. “It’s so Orwellian to tell us we have to feel this in this particular place. You can feel anything there. There are times when it’s so beautiful and tranquil and calm, and others when it’s rough as hell, and brutal and difficult and cold. The people who live and work there, the farmers, know that more than anybody. To describe their life as a pastoral idyll is just insulting, and wrong.” 

The installation was a provisional iteration of what is to be Goldsworthy’s most substantial work on his home terrain, a project called “Gravestones.” He first conceived of the piece while visiting the cemetery at Glencairn Parish Church, in Kirkland, where Judith Gregson, his former wife, is buried. (She died in a car accident in 2008, several years after their divorce.) Goldsworthy noticed that rough stones had been heaped in an out-of-the-way corner of the graveyard, and it dawned on him that they had been displaced from the ground to make way for coffins. “Once I realized what they were, that changed the stones completely,” Goldsworthy said. “They are treated as waste, and they accumulate in graveyards to the point that some people complain about them. I don’t know whether it’s that they don’t like the mess or that, subconsciously, they don’t like the reminder of what they represent. But, for me, they were unbelievably powerful—this connection to the exchange between the body and the earth, and the reminder of where we end up.” He envisaged a work consisting of four stone walls, each about four feet tall and eighty feet wide, surrounding a space filled with displaced stones from cemeteries throughout the county of Dumfries and Galloway.

I asked Goldsworthy if he felt that he could realize his work more effectively now because he has a stronger vision, or more resources. He answered, “I have a stronger everything.” Fifty years of making art had taught him how to work confidently with scale and mass and materials, allowing him to produce work that could last for centuries. “At the same time, there are also the ephemeral works,” he said. “They are at their strongest, and then they decay, they change, they collapse, and that can be beautiful, too.” I suggested that Goldsworthy himself was an ephemeral work. “We all are,” he replied.