Andy Goldsworthy, a British land artist best known for bright, fleeting sculptures made out of leaves, has spent much of the past decade toiling in an isolated valley in England in conditions few would see as bucolic.
At one point, Goldsworthy, 68, collected spools of barbed wire, rusting some in water and burning others in fires. Then he stretched the metal out, strand by vicious strand, so that he could use it to line the inside of a cottage. As he strung the wire taut, Goldsworthy recalled in a recent interview, he had to wear Kevlar wrist guards to make sure he didn’t cut himself.
During an “absolutely freezing” winter, Goldsworthy also carved an oval chamber into the stone of another building — “totally grim” work, he said.
More recently, Goldsworthy added, he had spent laborious months cutting up blackthorn trees, then attaching thousands of the thorns to wall panels for mounting in a barn.
All those buildings — and bruises — are part of “Hanging Stones,” a six-mile trail in the valley of Northdale, Yorkshire, along which Goldsworthy has restored nine farm buildings (and built one new one), then turned them all into artworks.
The project, Goldsworthy said, was “the most important of my life,” not just because of its scale. His aches and pains were no longer “disappearing like they used to,” he said, so he couldn’t spend another decade working on a demanding project like this. A time was coming when he would have to rely solely on others to do the hard work with stone, wood, earth.
“I’m drinking it all in while I can,” Goldsworthy said.
For decades now, he has been among the world’s most prominent land artists. Thanks to two films, and numerous books, he has become known for temporary works in which he might, say, spit colorful petals into the air or lie on a sidewalk just before a rainstorm hits to create a dry shadow (he uses photography to document these actions).
Goldsworthy has also created a database’s worth of major projects. In the United States, for instance, his pieces include a 750-foot-long dry stone wall at the Storm King Art Center in New York that snakes between trees before disappearing into a lake; a soaring wooden spire in the Presidio national park in San Francisco that in 2020 survived an arson attack; and a garden in which trees miraculously grow out of the middle of boulders that he made at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York.
All that work garnered him fans in the U.S. art and museum worlds. Molly Donovan, acting head of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, who commissioned Goldsworthy’s 2005 work “Roof,” a group of nine huge slate domes in the museum, said he was “one of the great artists of our time.” He is someone whose art, she added, “reveals details of our natural and built world that people normally ignore.”
Nora Lawrence, executive director of Storm King, said she didn’t think any other artist had “thought about nature as a medium in the same incredibly creative way that Andy does.”
Yet in Britain he is often overlooked. Waldemar Januszczak, art critic of The Sunday Times, once wrote that Goldsworthy was a victim of art world snobbery in his home country, with curators wrongly perceiving him as a “peddler of easy coffee-table pleasures.” In fact, Januszczak said, Goldsworthy was a “very serious artist, and a very tough one,” who, hands on, leads his projects rather than passing sketches to young assistants to realize them for him: “He’s hard-core.”
Now, that underappreciation may be about to change. On July 26, the National Galleries of Scotland is opening “Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years,” a retrospective that will be dominated by new installations and run through Nov. 2. And Goldsworthy is also finishing “Hanging Stones,” a project his fans are hailing as a capstone piece.
Peter Murray, the founding director of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, said in an interview that “Hanging Stones” was Goldsworthy’s “legacy” — a place where the artist had succeeded in adding a “new layer” to the rural landscape rather than imposing himself on it. There was no other piece of land art like it, he added.
Some of the buildings along the walk, like the barbed wire house, play on the history of an area that was once home to iron mining, and still is to agriculture. Others focus on nature, including one in which Goldsworthy placed tree trunks that stretch floor to ceiling, so visitors have to squeeze past. Others carry a more mystical or religious air like one where Goldsworthy smeared iron-stained mud from a nearby stream onto windows and walls, giving the light a red haze.
(Only a few groups can visit a day, and have to pick up a key from a local guesthouse to enter the houses. The walk is almost fully booked through September).
“Hanging Stones” didn’t begin as a vast piece. In 2012, David Ross, a British retail magnate, wanted to commission a land artist for his upcoming 50th birthday and Goldsworthy was the obvious choice. His initial idea was small, involving two buildings on opposite sides of the valley. But quickly the idea swelled and Goldsworthy was envisioning 10 houses, and having tortuous run-ins with the local planning authority, who said the project would “result in a harmful erosion of the character of the landscape.”
Chris France, planning director of the North York Moors National Park Authority, said in an interview that he had objected to four of the homes, but supported the project.
The artist’s fans often perceive him as a spiritual guru, at one with nature, but Goldsworthy doesn’t seem mystical in person. During the recent walk, which lasted about seven hours, he chatted about his life, work and the challenges of making “Hanging Stones” in a no-nonsense fashion more typical of a farmer than an artist.
During his time in Northdale, Goldsworthy had made a lot of out-there art. At one point, for instance, he lay naked in a river, until he appeared to be absorbed by the red iron color of the water, a camera capturing the moment.
A few locals were perplexed when, sensing a rainstorm, Goldsworthy had laid down in a road, planning to leave a shadow. As Goldsworthy lay motionless, he suddenly heard a commotion and looked up to see one of the local publicans and their sister running toward him carrying a defibrillator, having assumed Goldsworthy was having a heart attack.
“It’s all right, I’m not dead,” Goldsworthy recalled saying.
“Hanging Stones” meant so much to Goldsworthy partly because of its location. When it was commissioned, Goldsworthy said, his parents had lived a 10 minute drive away and working on the project had allowed him to be with his mother the night before she died. The landscape was also similar to those that shaped him.
Goldsworthy, whose father was a mathematician and whose mother did not work outside the home, grew up in Leeds, a city in Yorkshire about 55 miles south of Northdale. His early forays into art included designing tattoos and insignia for Asphalt Animals, an informal motorcycle gang he belonged to.
At 14, he made what he considers his first sculpture by accident. Working on a farm to earn pocket money, he one day was made to collect stones from a field and as he piled them up, they formed a pyramid. “I knew the last stone would fit perfectly on top,” Goldsworthy recalled. The farmer told Goldsworthy to put a flag on it.
Those years of farm labor were essential to his practice, Goldsworthy said. “That ability to work hard, to work repetitively for long hours, to work physically — that’s been with me all my life.”
Goldsworthy studied art at an out-of-the-way university in Lancaster, England, where he started working outside. Staying in cheap seaside housing, he got an urge to grab a spade and scrape random lines into the sand. “In those few hours, I realized that sand is not all the same,” Goldsworthy said. Some patches were wet, some soft, some hard. He had never considered earth like that before. “That moment, it just shifted what art is for me, not just seeing it as a vehicle for my own feelings and expression, but as a way of learning about the world, and feeding off it,” he said.
(Goldsworthy said repeatedly in the interview that he “fed” by making art outside and felt drained if he went a long period without doing so.)
During the recent walk, Goldsworthy appeared not to have lost any of his childlike wonder at nature. At one point, he entered the Red House, the building with iron-smeared windows, and initially seemed disappointed. “The light’s OK today,” he said, “but yesterday it was magical, this mad vibrant red, pulsating with life.” He then walked in and out of the building, intrigued by the change and hoping the light would shift again.
Goldsworthy has several major projects on the horizon. In Scotland, where he lives, he plans to make an emotionally weighty work in which he would build a structure using the soil that gravediggers remove from plots. In a royal park in Stockholm, he hopes to dig down to bedrock, so that visitors could see how that usually hidden part of the earth flows beneath their feet. He also said he had private commissions in California, Maine, Massachusetts and New Mexico.
But “Hanging Stones,” though it was supposedly finished, clearly still transfixed him. “I would love to work here forever,” Goldsworthy said. “I’m trying to find ways.” As long as his body allowed, he wouldn’t be able to stop himself from walking through the valley, talking to the farmers, touching the earth and trying to make some art. He had to feed after all.
Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London.
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