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'''Andy Goldsworthy''' the British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist (born 1956), whose ephemeral works are made from the natural materials of a chosen place and recorded in photographs before they decay or disappear. His sculpture, created from stone, wood, leaves, ice and snow, explores the relationship between humanity and the natural world and the passage of time.

== Early Life and Formation ==
Andy Goldsworthy was born in 1956 in Cheshire, England, the son of a mathematics professor, and grew up on the outskirts of Leeds. He worked as a farm labourer in his teens, an experience that gave him a direct and physical familiarity with the land, its weather and its materials, and he has said that this early contact shaped his whole approach.

He studied at Bradford College of Art and then at Preston Polytechnic, where he took a degree in fine art. His early work was influenced by Land art and by the sculpture of the 1970s, and he became interested in working directly in the landscape rather than in the studio, using only what he found on site.

He moved to Scotland and settled in Dumfriesshire, where he has lived and worked for much of his career. The landscape of the region, its farms, rivers, woods and stone walls, became the setting and material of his art, and he developed the practice of working alone and without tools beyond his hands and a few simple implements.

== Ephemeral Sculpture and Photography ==
Goldsworthy's characteristic method is to arrange natural materials in patterns or forms that reveal the order and beauty latent in a place. He might join leaves edge to edge to make a line of colour, stack stones into a cone, weave twigs into a spiral, or freeze icicles into an arch. The work is often made in a single day and left to dissolve with the weather.

Because the sculptures are transient, the photograph is essential to their preservation. Goldsworthy photographs his own work, often at dawn or dusk, and the image becomes the way the piece is known. He has insisted, however, that the photograph is a record rather than the artwork, and that the making and the experience of the place are primary.

His practice is attentive to the specific conditions of each site and season. Snow, rain, tide, wind and sunlight are collaborators, and the outcome often depends on chance. When a piece fails, he accepts it as part of the process and begins again, and this willingness to work with rather than against nature is central to his art.

== Major Commissions and Land Works ==
While continuing to make ephemeral works, Goldsworthy has undertaken permanent commissions that engage with architecture and community. His stone sheepfold structures, such as the one at Grizedale and the series in Cumbria, refer to the agricultural heritage of the region and are built by traditional dry-stone methods.

He created a long serpentine wall for the Storm King Art Center in New York State, a work that snakes through the trees and water and can be walked along. He has also made major works in Japan, France, the United States and elsewhere, often involving local stone and the participation of craftsmen and volunteers.

The Chalk Stones of Sussex, a trail of boulders winding through the South Downs, and the ambitious stone installations at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park show how his forms can operate at the scale of the landscape. He has also worked in snow and ice in the Arctic, where the extreme conditions tested and renewed his methods.

== Philosophy and Themes ==
Goldsworthy's art is rooted in a set of closely related themes: the cycle of growth and decay, the flow of energy through nature, the fragility of the moment and the continuity of material through change. His works often take circular and spiral forms, echoing the shapes of growth in plants and of movement in water and wind.

He speaks of the need to understand the land and to cooperate with it rather than to dominate it, and his methods are informed by an ecological sensibility. He does not regard nature as a backdrop or a resource but as a partner, and his interventions are designed to be gentle, reversible and in keeping with their setting.

He has written and spoken extensively about his practice, and his books, combining photographs with reflections on particular projects, have brought his work to a wide audience. He insists that the value of his art lies in the discipline of looking closely and in the attention it teaches us to pay to the ordinary world.

== Reception and Influence ==
Goldsworthy became widely known through documentary films and through the international circulation of his photographs, which made ephemeral sculpture accessible to audiences far from the sites where it was made. His work has been shown in galleries and museums, where the photographs and the occasional preserved pieces represent the larger practice.

He has influenced the growing interest in environmental and land-based art, and his example has encouraged artists to work with natural materials and with questions of ecology and sustainability. His refusal of permanence and of the market for objects has been seen as a challenge to conventional assumptions about what a work of art is.

He continues to work in Scotland and on commissions around the world. His art is now part of the public imagination of the relationship between people and nature, and the images of his brief, patient constructions have taught many viewers to see the landscapes they inhabit with fresh attention.

== See also ==
* Land art
* Environmental art
* Ephemeral art
* Stone sculpture

== References ==

<ref name="r1">Andy Goldsworthy, Stone, Harry N. Abrams, 1994.</ref>
<ref name="r2">Andy Goldsworthy, Wood, Harry N. Abrams, 1996.</ref>
<ref name="r3">Terry Friedman, Andy Goldsworthy: Touching Nature, Overlook Press, 2001.</ref>
<ref name="r4">Andy Goldsworthy, Time, Harry N. Abrams, 2000.</ref>

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[[Category:Art]]
[[Category:Sculpture]]
[[Category:England]]

Andy Goldsworthy - Revision history

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