Andy Goldsworthy: Natural Man
With the painstaking attention of a fine jeweler, Andy Goldsworthy crafts artworks out of natural materials, including his own body. All of his pieces are designed to disappear as nature takes its course: Ice melts, wind blows, and rain falls, factors that shape how viewers experience Goldsworthy’s constructions over the course of their temporary life spans. The British artist is constantly working, an obsession depicted in his photographs of close to 200 works created over a ten-year period and assembled in the voluminous new book Andy Goldsworthy: Ephemeral Works, 2004–2014 (Abrams, $85). Overlapping with the book’s publication is a show at New York’s Galerie Lelong called “Andy Goldsworthy: Leaning into the Wind,” which features photographs of old and recent work involving the artist’s body. The exhibit is on view through December 12.
1/8Andy Goldsworthy’s projects take him around the world, from New York sidewalks to French mountain ranges to the North Pole. Much of his recent work, however, is close to his adopted Scottish home of Dumfriesshire, including this 2009 work of ice stacked between two trunks of an ash tree.
2/8Goldsworthy’s most time-consuming step in the process of laying curved sticks around a river boulder in Woody Creek, Colorado, was finding the right sticks.
3/8Goldsworthy enlists his own body in works as yet another natural element on which to draw. Here, in Cuenca, Spain, he scattered limestone dust that was the by-product of a project called Sleeping Stones.
4/8Much of the artist’s work plays tricks with our perceptions of light, space, and depth. What appears to be an unearthly glow at the base of a sycamore tree is actually the careful placement of leaves around its roots. This 2013 installation was for the Berrydown Foundation in Hampshire, England.
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5/8On a frosty March morning in Sinderby, England, the artist crawled through a hedge, seemingly in defiance of gravity. “Cold hands,” he writes in the book’s spare text.
6/8A rivulet of red pouring down ancient steps in Cañete, Spain, is made from poppy petals Goldsworthy collected from fields and then fixed to the steps with water.
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7/8Close to his home in Dumfriesshire, Goldsworthy painted bands onto a tree with mud he collected from a nearby bog.
8/8Andy Goldsworthy: Ephemeral Works, 2004–2014* was published this fall by Abrams.
