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The first piece by Andy Goldsworthy that I remember seeing in person was just outside of Inverleith House, on the grounds of Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, when it was still being operated as a contemporary art space independent of the gardens around 2014. A small, conical dome titled Slate Cone, probably not much taller than me, loosely resembled a pinecone, and it just kind of squatted there on the lawn, adjacent to the house, made from the same slate that defines the rooftops of historic buildings across Scotland. I always thought it was a curious shape, and over the years, a stone or two looked to have gone missing. But I always enjoyed wandering past it when I visited. I’m not sure if it’s there anymore, but another work in the gardens from 1990, Slate, Hole, Wall, was made in collaboration with dry-stone waller Joe Smith to resemble the miles of dark gray walls that slice through the Scottish countryside.
Goldworthy’s works are largely made outdoors and are–it probably goes without saying—best experienced outdoors. But for a major retrospective currently on view at the Royal Scottish Academy, Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, hosted by the National Galleries of Scotland, he brings the outside in. His most recent work consists of several site-specific pieces like Oak Passage and Wool Runner, the latter made of sheared sheepswool with colorful paint marks typically used to identify flocks, which stretches the length of a long staircase. Like his land art, these new pieces interact with the physical characteristics of the building itself, stretching between columns or across wide floors, in some cases almost tapestry-like. While the physical confines of a neoclassical museum have the effect of kind of hemming in Goldsworthy’s pieces, he doesn’t miss the opportunity to challenge visitors’ expectations of material, application, and prescribed routes.
What I’ve always enjoyed most about Goldsworthy’s interventions is the friction he conjures between dualistic forces related to growth, impermanence, territory, and the tenuous human-nature relationship. A series of permanent sculptures at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, for example, includes a series of enclosures—three from 2007 and one from 2022—that riff on the practice of using folds, or pens, to gather animals. When I first saw Outclosure, situated in the trees with no way to get in or out and a wall too high to see over, I was so intrigued the idea of a structure drawing influence from a traditional design conceived for its practicality that has, within the context of nature, transformed into the opposite. I felt confronted; challenged. Outclosure excludes us so that nature rules within, and the only creatures that can easily enter are the small variety, entering by means of branches. The pen’s protective barrier is also, in a way, a perpetual prison.
Goldsworthy, who grew up on the fringe of Leeds with the rolling Yorkshire countryside in one direction and the city’s urban thrum in the other, learned some of the skills he’s employed in his practice while helping on local farms as a teenager. He has lived in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, for the last four decades, where the similarly rolling hills and moors have continued to have an indelible influence. His earliest experiments involved fundamental activities like digging, cutting, gathering, and stacking. When he studied art at Bradford and Preston, he began to experiment with the nature of ephemerality through time-based works that he documented on film, like carrying carved hunks of snow through meadows, for example, or capturing the disordered patterns that hazel sticks make when thrown into the air.
Temporality reigns in Goldworthy’s interventions with chalk-dusted trees, rows of twigs, and carefully arranged leaves and stones. The inherent knowledge that animals trundle through leaves or they rot—that rain washes away dust or gusts of wind can uproot trees—undergirds that elusive and beautiful friction, not just of his pieces but of nature’s own elemental behavior.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say Goldsworthy’s works are sinister, but their unusual scale, inaccessibility, or ephemerality suggest a level of difficulty, tension, and sometimes suspicion. He taps into a quiet urgency that has become more and more prescient within the context of our evolving climate crisis. This urgency also manifests itself as a reminder to simply notice and appreciate our surroundings before it’s too late. The artist is always poking that bear: “He often presents the land as a hard, hostile and brutal place,” the museum says. “Fences and barriers feature prominently in the form of rusted barbed wire stretched across a room and a massive, cracked clay wall. As in nature, beauty and danger co-exist.”
One of my favorite pieces in Fifty Years, which I hadn’t seen before this show, is Hedge crawl. Dawn. Frost. Cold hands. Sinderby, England. 4 March 2014. Not only is the physical, even performative element of this work made more powerful by its obvious awkwardness and potential for bodily injury, but Goldsworthy squares up to the winter hedge as if it’s a thoroughfare rather than a barrier; a conduit instead of a border. The lyrical title is akin to a journal entry and a hint at the visceral experience of not only challenging nature, but challenging humans’ attempts to control nature in the first place.
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years at RSA comprises more than 200 works made during the past five decades, from new works to a range of drawings, photos, films, sketchbooks, and archival objects that date back to the mid-1970s. The exhibition continues through November 2.
Header image: Edges made by finding leaves the same size. Tearing one in two. Spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another. Brough, Cumbria. Cherry patch. 4 November 1984, 1984. Cibachrome photograph.
All images courtesy of the artist and National Galleries of Scotland.