Andy Goldsworthy

A simple stone, drab grey an hour before now sits in empiric beauty in the shallows of a river, the round and tumbled sensuous form gleaming with damp crimson leaves. The image of a work by Andy Goldsworthy just might be the sort of lovely dream one revisits repeatedly. Whether it’s crinkly tufts of lamb’s wool or the rough and greasy nubs of bracken Goldsworthy utilizes in his works, the viewer finds that no medium is devoid of immaculate grace and beauty in his eyes, in his hands.

Goldsworthy now has a half-dozen or so books in print as well as a feature-length movie documenting his processes and his works. Any one of these will provide inspiration, awe, and the link to a child-like but sophisticated fascination with the world around him. With an almost earthly divinity, he connects to each site he visits and explores, waiting for the place to speak to him, to reveal itself and be known to him. Goldsworthy’s shamanic aspect shows itself readily in his face and eyes.

“Each work joins the next in a line that defines the passage of my life, the momentum of which gives me a strong sense of anticipation for the future.”

I like very much this idea of one’s life works connecting one to another and forming a sort of active clock, a biological clock, by which we can see ourselves evolving and turning. And the anticipation part, this eagerness for the future, makes much more sense in this context than the idea of looking ahead to, say, the sitcoms on tomorrow night.

One of his book titles, Hand to Earth, holds succinct clarity for the work Goldsworthy produces. His creations come certainly not effortlessly, but tirelessly. Perhaps this title is a play-on-words for the expression ‘hand to mouth’. Living hand to mouth, or working that way, producing art that way, by definition means ‘a precarious existence; having or providing nothing to spare.’ Would that we all lived that way, giving of ourselves so fully and completely that we cease to exist outside ourselves. I love the ephemeral quality of that, and of Goldsworthy’s projects: compellingly simple but profound in their intensity.

- Sarah