Quote

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

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Andy Goldsworthy
Age: 68
Born: 1956
Born: July 25
Artist
Environmental Artist
Environmentalist
Land Artist
Photographer
Sculptor
County Palatine of Chester
Andi Gōruzuwājī
Andrew Goldsworthy
Whole
Objects
Leafs
Important
Behinds
Leaf
Trying
Behind
Processes
Single
Isolated
Working
Stone
Understand
Object
Process
Stones
Nature
Materials

More quotes by Andy Goldsworthy

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It's art that's taught me to think and to write.
Andy Goldsworthy
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I have to understand the nature of change. And I cannot just work with stone or the more permanent materials. I need to work with leaves and ice and snow and mud and clay and water and the rising tide and the wind and all these.
Andy Goldsworthy
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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
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We leave our presence in the pavement. We're walking over it, sitting on steps.
Andy Goldsworthy
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I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.
Andy Goldsworthy
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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
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I think that I'm always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see.
Andy Goldsworthy
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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
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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
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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
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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
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The early firings contained many stones.
Andy Goldsworthy
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I have six acres in front of my own house, which I very rarely work on. Most of the work occurs on farmers' fields around me. And I like the discipline of working on other people's land.
Andy Goldsworthy
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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
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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
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I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do and live the way I do.
Andy Goldsworthy
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There's a huge number of things that are occurring with the ice works which fascinate me enormously, but it's driven by this kind of frantic race against time. And whilst that creates a huge amount of tension and problems, it's a tension that I think I feed off.
Andy Goldsworthy
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I take the opportunity each day offers.
Andy Goldsworthy
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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
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Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit.
Andy Goldsworthy