The Landscape Artist Andy Goldsworthy Contemplates His Own Natural Decay

Goldsworthy’s reputation has sometimes suffered from the irresistible imitability of some of his gestures. He sadly blames himself for the proliferation of imitative stone cairns, and also for having made too many of them himself earlier in his career. (Thousands, he gave up building and mostly kept his resolve.) The accessibility of his work and his use of natural materials mean that it is often adopted in primary school curricula, and he has learned to smile politely when his parents tell him that their child has “made an Andy Goldsworthy” with sticks, stones and leaves. However, he drew a line a few years ago when, while participating in a group exhibition at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts, the institution made a similar blunder. “They put a pile of stones outside with a sign saying ‘Create your own Andy Goldsworthy’ – none of the other artists, just me,” he said. “I told them to take it down. It’s inappropriate.”

Cartoon by Benjamin Schwartz

The sheer beauty of some of Goldsworthy’s works – sliced ​​fronds of heron feathers arranged in stark geometries, or a rock covered in blood-red poppy petals – has sometimes led him to be characterized as a visual version of an exultant nature poet. But Goldsworthy laments that city dwellers view the countryside as a picturesque escape. “For me, landscape isn’t a place you go for therapy and relaxation, it’s to challenge yourself and get ideas, and to generate thoughts and feelings and emotions,” he told me. “It’s a very powerful thing to deal with.”

When Goldsworthy was a teenager, he worked part-time on dairy and cattle farms, and his art implicitly honors the demands of working the land. A field is “a battlefield,” he told me. “It was earned through hard work and effort.” Some of Goldsworthy’s works also required strenuous effort. He sometimes incorporated his own body, as in “Hedge Crawl,” made in North Yorkshire in 2014, for which he made a video of himself climbing through a row of gnarled hawthorns, nature’s barbed wire. (He said of the experience: “It’s another world inside,” adding, “I didn’t realize I was bleeding until I was done.”) Other experiences were just as difficult, like putting foraged objects in your mouth and then spitting them out. “As soon as you put a petal or a flower in your mouth, the whole perception changes,” he explains with undisguised joy. “Is it going to kill me? mouth, it’s pretty. When it goes in your mouth, it’s ‘Oh, shit.’ I love it.

In some ways, Goldsworthy’s rural life keeps him isolated from the world. He keeps a low profile online: he doesn’t have Instagram and his website doesn’t offer any contact information. Although he is represented by galleries in New York and Los Angeles, he has not signed a contract with any in the UK for decades. “He has an anti-sales approach to sales,” collector David Ross told me. His studio is run by Tina Fiske, an art historian who gently steps in for him. She is also his companion. (They have a fifteen-year-old son, Goldsworthy’s fifth. He has four adult children from his former marriage.)

However, once you meet up with Goldsworthy, he is affable and talkative. Cheerfulness bubbles beneath his words, even when he raises the prospect of inevitable physical decline. Goldsworthy, who has a shock of white hair and a beard, is fearsomely robust; despite Scotland’s usually harsh winter, he rarely bundles up in more than a Carhartt jacket, and I once saw him test whether a rubber boot had a hole by standing in a freezing stream until his foot was wet. But, during the installation of the Edinburgh exhibition, the chief curator, Patrick Elliott, gently reminded him that this would probably be the last time he would lug stones through a gallery, or climb up and down a ladder while plastering a wall with clay. The attic he purchased forty years ago was recently transformed into a climate-controlled archive for his photographs and paintings. The installation is designed to survive it. “I’m still fit, I can still work, but it’s not going to last,” Goldsworthy told me. “I don’t know how many years I have left to do what I do.”