Andy Goldsworthy famous quotes

We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Connections #Forget #Lost

Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change. And in the case of some sculptures, time gives a patina to them.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Time #Giving #Growth

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Winter #Snow #Childhood

As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Rocks #Ice #Trying

Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Winter #Snow #Special

Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Interesting #Able #Sometimes

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Essence #Drawing

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Differences #Theatre #Energy

My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Mean #Cities

Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Winter #Artist #Years

The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Lying #Trying

I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Rocks #Want #Sticks

Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Keys #Light

When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Important #Trying #Stones

Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things; otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realization. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Ideas #Differences #Would Be

Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Rain #Independent #Rocks

Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Photography #Distance #Way

Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Artist #Elements #Splits

Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There's something very powerful about finding snow in summer.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Summer #Nature #Powerful

I have worked with this red all over the world - in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia - a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Running #Artist #Japan

Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Artist #Night #Gone

Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Animal #Energy #Way

Fire is the origin of stone.By working the stone with heat, I am returning it to its source.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Fire #Stones #Heat

Three or four stones in one firing will all react differently. I try to achieve a balance between those that haven't progressed enough and those about to go too far.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Balance #Trying #Three

The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Blood #Iron #Stones

Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Beauty #Pain

Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Light #Blood #Growth

Time confined into blind caves or extended through tunnels, responds to the call of infinity, which teases with its promise of freedom. outside the body, time is a pair of compasses in the hands of eternity, but inside it is a pendulum, fastened to the heart. the heart takes its measure from the lengthening swing of the pendulum surveying what time is left. in its own rhythm time spreads itself wildly here and there and is crippled elsewhere. its unequally distributed weight wounds my body - that is how the particularities of my life are manifest.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Heart #Hands #Tunnels

It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Journey #Snow #Quality

As you grow older you realize that art has an enormous effect. It's frightening sometimes to think of the effect that we can have.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Thinking #Aging

I'm dealing with the most important things there are: life and nature. If this doesn't work, if this doesn't sustain me, I can't go back to nature. I'm right there. There's nowhere to go, and that frightens me.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Important #Nowhere To Go #Importance

Understanding the materials I work with... gives me a deeper understanding of my place. And it's helped me make sense of the changes that are happening to me as I grow older.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Giving #Understanding #Grows

I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Car #Gardening

Art is not a career - it's a life.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Careers #Art Is

It's art that's taught me to think and to write.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Writing #Thinking

My work comes first, reasons for it follow.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Firsts #Reason

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Memories #Historical #Stones

It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Scary #Watches #Stones

The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Stronger #Skins #Quality

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#People #Needs #Sculpture

When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Beautiful #Balance #Collapse

There are occasions when I have moved boulders, but I'm reluctant to, especially ones that have been rooted in a place for many years.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Years #Boulders #Occasions

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Beautiful #Harsh #Minutes

A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it. It is different than patience. It is not thinking. It is working with the rhythm.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Thinking #Different #Potatoes

The early firings contained many stones.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Stones

People also leave presence in a place even when they are no longer there.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#People

One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist's entire life. What I've learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Past #Years

My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays-integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Simple #Filters #Lenses

For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Fall #Opportunity #Weather

Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Lying #Ephemeral

A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Artist #Simple #Ideas

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Dying #Landscape #Something New

Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Land #Needs

Everything has the energy of its making inside it.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Energy

The first snowball I froze was put in my mother's deep freeze when I was in my early 20s.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Mother #Firsts #Snowball

I did tests on small stones before collecting and committing myself to the larger ones.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Stones #Tests #Collecting

The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Artist #Energy #Lines

At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient - only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Heart #Successful #Looks

There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Beach #Nature #Memories

I take the opportunity each day offers.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Opportunity #Each Day #Offers

The stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Promise #Tears #Flesh

I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Way #Quiet #Introvert

Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Stones #Form #Reconstruction

I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Fire #Flames #Heat

We often forget that we are nature...
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Forget

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Materials

Confrontation is something that I accept as part of the project though not its purpose.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Purpose #Accepting #Projects

My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Work Out #Important #Watches