Andy Goldsworthy was born July 25, 1956, in Cheshire, England. He was the son of Frederick Alan (a professor) and Muriel Goldsworthy. He married Judith Elisabeth Gregson who he had 4 children with, James, Holly, Anna and Thomas.
He went to Harrogate High School an advanced art school where he spent his free time working on a local farm. The experiences he on the farm gave him a lot of knowledge about working with the land. After High School he attended Bradford Collage of art from 1974-1975, and Preston Polytechnic collage from, 1975-1978.Goldsworthy also took additional courses in fine art and began to develop his own style.
He also loved the outdoors and soon it became his studio he moved out of the collage and back onto the farm he had worked at. He was very interested in how the land changed through the seasons and what grew on it, he believed the land was his teacher. He told Anna Murphy in an interview for London’s Observer. “Farming itself is a sculptural process, fields are ploughed, bales of hay are stacked, walls are built.
The day is spent shaping and re-creating what is around you. Goldsworthy is known for working in unfavourable weather conditions so he could use the snow ice rain and seasonal change. A good example of some of Andy Goldsworthy’s work is his snowballs in Glasgow. With the help of some art students he created eighteen large snowballs which were shown in the Old Museum of Transport.
After five days the only thing left was the debris the snowballs had picked up scattered across the floor. Goldsworthy marks the moments of change through the documentation of the events and performances.His works range from massive brick walls to poppy petals strung together with thorns. He travels all around the world to do land art though much of his work his done here in England.
His first really famous project was in the United States and came in 1997 with “The Storm King Wall” at a sculpture park at the Storm King Arts Centre in Mountainville, New York. It was a massive 600m wall made entirely from rocks he found in the area. He didn’t use any kind of mortar. To look at the wall is amazing it weaves snake like through maple and oak trees and at one end it appears to be rising out of the water.
Photo by Dicksoto’s Another project he did in the United States was in New York City in 2003. On a second-story rooftop, he created the “Garden of Stones” memorial for Jewish heritage. He made lumps of granite hollowed out, for jewish holocaust survivors to plant chestnut and oak saplings. Goldsworthy explained to Baker in the Town & Country article that “the trees growing out of stone are an expression of a person’s ability to survive under the most difficult circumstances.
” One sculptor I found astounding was his ice Spiral.He got lots of icicles and froze them together in a spiral going up around a tree. Using the same principle he makes a spiky ball out of icicles frozen together at the bass. Goldsworthy does a lot of work with strong contrast.
I tried to reconstruct one of his works on my front page. Making a dark line down a forest bed. By ripping leaves and placing the two halves a cm apart. Another thing he does with the same concept is dig a little trench in the earth to leave a dark line running across the ground.
One of his works he does this in the shape of a shadow of a branch then lays the branch over it and it looks like the branch has a very strong shadow. Autumn seems to be the season when he does a lot of his projects. I guess because you can really start to see changes, the leaves start turning red and falling off the trees, days get shorter, colder and rainier. Some of his most striking work is done with different colored leaves.
He does a lot of shading with the leaves, he gets leaves with every shade of red orange and yellow will pin them together in a line with sticks.He also covers rocks in flower petals or coloured leaves. He will colour just one rock and it looks amazing because amongst all the grey rock there is one bright red or green rock poking out. He sticks the leaves and petals on only using water so that when they dry they will fall off.
Goldsworthy says in an article “The fact that someone has walked in a place where I work, has lived in it and died in it, gives what I do its context, its depth,” he told Baker in another article, “The fact is that we live our lives on top of other people’s.That’s why I don’t like work that claims a place. That’s not the intention. ” Unlike other visual artworks andy goldsworthy creations are temporary and generally can’t be seen in galleries.
Each of his art works is inherently part of the environment in which it is created. This fact gives it a quality like other living things. As far as I know Andy Goldsworthy is still out there creating astonishing works of art.
