But by erasing traces of his own hand he heightens the affinity between his constructions and their setting and conceals the history of his intervention. To create this effect, Goldsworthy selects elements of nature and arranges them until they just exceed the limit possible for natural organization and enter into an irrefutable human ordering. Although Goldsworthy gives himself more latitude, positioning the natural materials into more exceptional situations, in the first instant of their viewing his ephemeral pieces raise the possibility that nature alone produced these remarkable spectacles. Richard Long arranged stones into a circle, minimally intervening with nature. In Goldsworthy’s art nothing ever appears decrepit or gross. Yet while nature is messy, sloppy, dirty, random, arbitrary, and overabundant, Goldsworthy creates order: meticulously selecting materials, sequence, and ultimate form. His ephemeral sculptures rely on an abstraction that has become so acclimated that it no longer requires any effort of vision, and the viewer does not notice it as art. Because of its association with nature or, in the case of the cairns, pre-modern culture, Goldsworthy’s work tends to be seen as a visionary transmission direct from nature itself. It takes an effort to step back from Goldsworthy’s virtuoso performance and see beyond feats of technical skill, to realize that his art consists not in uncovering nature but in his ability to make artifice appear naturalized. While Goldsworthy is the first to clarify that he uses modern tools and machines, he as quickly emphasizes that when adhering chains of poppy petals or icicle spirals, he uses no glue: “spit” is his adhesive. And the backdrop for this work is nature-he situates his art on forest grounds or in trees or streams. Each piece features nature unadulterated: branches, stones, leaves, and snow. Photo: Courtesy Galerie Lelong and Haines Gallery.Īndy Goldsworthy’s work receives accolades for its lack of manufacture. East Coast Cairn/Made Between High Tides/No Collapses/Calm/New Rochelle, New York/November 2001, 2001. So I redrew the work, which was wonderful to be able to go back and revive a work that I had been made previously.Three Cairns demonstrates several important aspects of Goldsworthy’s career. I returned to the slate quarry two days after making the piece there and even though it had rained heavily, the outline of the work was still there. are impossible, but tried anyway and succeeded. There's been so many things that I've told myself that will not. It is important to take a chance on a work to see if it succeeds. It's beginning to dry now around the stones. I like the roughness, but it loses the detail. That's always the difficulty of making it on a very rough surface. So getting up off the slate is awkward, I don't want to reveal any of it. Picking the moment when to get up is always tricky, too. So what is causing the disappearance of one work is creating the other. It's quite nice laying alongside the work. I will do one of those - probably just here. So I lay down and the rain wets all around me.Īnd then I get up leaving a dry shadow where I've laid. In all the time that I've worked here, I've never yet managed to make a rain shadow, which is what I do when it rains. to balance it up with the solidity of the slate.Īnd hopefully something will emerge that where the drawing will appear to have more presence than the slate itself, so it sort of floats over the slate. I've decided to fill it in somewhat, I think to, um. Today, there's obviously a little bit of tension with the weather because this is a dry work, It’s a work made for dry slate, as it is now.Īt first, I didn't know whether I was just going to do a line. So it's not as if I've come here with a white crayon and made these lines. With the slate being dry, it has this wonderful capacity to be drawn on - slate against slate.Īnd I like that between these two things you can produce that.Īnd that the line is not just drawn on the slate. The slate is so much about layering, the way that it's formed.Īnd when you get a block of slate and slice it up to something, it's so extraordinary seeing this book of stone being revealed, and as you lift one piece off another, how you're looking back in time, really. I work directly with the land, working in materials I find in the landscape, whether it be Japan, the North Pole.īut it's the landscape around my home that's the most important to me, and it's that landscape to which I keep returning, and is the place that I can learn most about nature and my relationship with it.
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