Andy Goldsworthy has been hailed as a genius for his mega half-century retrospective, FIFTY, organised by the Scottish National Gallery at the Royal Scottish Academy as the centrepiece to this year’s Edinburgh Festival. What did the artist do after such triumph, awash with rave reviews (even from the notorious Waldemar)? Naturally, this workaholic went back to his Dumfriesshire home up a hillside in the Scottish Borders and immediately made three new works, “Back outside where I belong.” I know this as he sends me photos. First was “Oak Leaves” on 28 Jul, next “Wool Teased out through bushes, small trees and nettles” on 29 Jul, then “Meadowsweet Road Line” on 30 Jul.
I’ve known Goldsworthy for over 49 years. Currently my archive contains nearly 30 pieces about him, including big reviews for key shows like his Snowballs at Glasgow Tramway 1989, Paris Aline Vidal, 89, Edinburgh Botanics 1990, Fruitmarket at the Festival 92, Stone Arches, London 1994, Sheepfolds in 96, 1998 when he filled the new Museum of Scotland, a memorial to the horrors of 9/11 at Manhattan’s Jewish Museum 2003, then more arches on roof of New York’s Met, 2004. I lived in Manhattan for 20 years and soon learnt that Goldsworthy was in huge demand across America, where many art galleries and museums feature permanent Goldsworthy works, with private commissions ranging from the US to Australia, Japan, France, Spain, Italy and Alaska.
But most of GOLDSWORTHY’s works are ephemeral, site-specific, transient, constructed from delicate leaves, reeds, petals, weeds, flowers, and icicles. For 50 years, he’s made his name worldwide by building, weaving, floating and folding natural materials from leaf to fern, snow to sand. Even his stone sculptures are sited in remote landscapes, up an inaccessible hill, across a lake in Upstate New York. Yet he is practically a household name. How so?
From the very start, in 1978 when he was 22, he’s documented his creations in field, forest, ford, fell or desert with magical intensity and clarity, and since 1988 has published these vivid colour photographs in sell-out books illustrating his exquisite creations made entirely of natural materials. Long before the preservation of the landscape and the environment, of trees, forests, flowers, insects, birds, became a standard TV and media theme, Goldsworthy was out here, mapping, inspecting, recording the everyday wonders of nature. Under his eye, things we take for granted spring into focus. Sunny dandelions transform into amazing fluffs of white gossamer. Brambles, reeds, old twigs, new shoots, streams in spring, iced over in winter, Goldsworthy’s books enabled the masses to get to know his art from the comfort of their fireside rather than climbing up muddy hillsides or sliding down wet rocks – which I have done!
Goldsworthy began his career as a 14-year-old farm labourer in Yorkshire. Not the usual outlet for the son of a university maths professor, maybe a rebellious gesture? But his work ethic is total. He says he likes the rawness, the hard graft, the reality of manual labour, of heaving mud and working with barbed wire. “The land may look pastoral and picturesque, but it’s a brutal place, the farm a tough place. Sheep make the Scottish landscape”
This explains the entry carpet of sheep fleece going up the RSA stairs, where you are greeted by marble columns covered with barbed wire. (Red tape would have been easier! Can u imagine the permits required!)
Goldsworthy wants you to stop and think, recognise that the posh shiny RSA floor is made of oak. His version of oak for the show is of fallen oak branches, windfall salvaged from Dumfriesshire fields, now arranged in a dramatic passage you must walk through. “We are bound up in the land. Look at your dining room table. There is a disconnect nowadays between us and the land.” Goldsworthy is trying to change all that, make us recognise our most basic of connections.
His most spectacular room installation is of 10,000 reeds or bullrushes suspended from its skylights. But the bravest piece in the show is a simple room of stones. They come for digging out, not under a hedge or around a cow barn, but from his wife’s grave. He and Judith had four children before separating. Judith, a ceramicist from the Potteries, and her father also inspired the wall of cracked red mud in the exhibition, which took 20 people to make and ten days to dry. Like much of his work, it looks effortless, but it is far from it.
Photography has always played a crucial role. Goldsworthy’s first book, Touching North, was published in Edinburgh by Graeme Murray and is now a collector’s item. It focuses on his remarkable 1988 trip to the Arctic when he worked with snow and ice to sculpt shimmering arches and frozen towers. In 1990, he published a big book to coincide with a major retrospective at the Henry Moore Centre, followed by a book on stone in 1994, then Wood 1997, Mud and Clay 2000, Snowballs 2001 and so on.
Along the way, he has become a friend whom my husband and I would bump into at the airport as we flew to and fro between America and Scotland. He was always keen to make new projects and was always working. He never rests, making a piece on Christmas morning for his kids when they were small, and is most happy when his farmer friends approve his efforts! Is he pleased with the show? “I’m 70! It’s a wonderful moment in my life. Exhilarating!
Strangely, he’s an OBE, but does not have the letters RSA after his name, which to me is odd, given his massive success worldwide from a Scottish base!
ANDY GOLDSWORTHY: FIFTY – National Galleries of Scotland Exhibition in the Royal Scottish Academy Building at the Edinburgh Festival. Royal Scottish Academy On now until Sun 2 Nov 2025 Open daily, 10 am–5 pm Tickets £5–£19 | Friends go free
Words/Top Photo: Clare Henry
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