Passage: Andy Goldsworthy
- Artist: Andy Goldsworthy
- Published: 2004
- Publisher: Thames & Hudson, London
- Edition: First
- Format: Hardback
- Height: 29cm
- Pages: 168
- Illustrations: 200 colour illustrations
£35.00
Add to basketPassage: Andy Goldsworthy
The journeys that people, rivers, landscapes and even stone take through space and time are central to this book. An account of a cairn built on the crest of a small hill at the entrance to the village in Scotland where Andy Goldsworthy lives reveals the importance of his work close to home, which is the inspiration for so much that he then creates elsewhere. Three cairns similar to the one in Scotland now span the United States, marking the artist's own journey across the States as well as the culmination of a form that has played a significant element in his work for the last twenty years. The vigorous beauty of Goldsworthy's work and its connection to death and decay are articulated in a series of works with elm trees. Made next to a small river in the south west of Scotland, the works range from glowing yellow leaves to dead branches that celebrate the life cycle of the elm. The flow and passage of time are explored and strongly expressed by Goldsworthy's works relating to water. Over the past few years the artist has developed an almost obsessive need to work alongside rivers and the sea. Ephemeral works made on the beach and in rivers change and disappear in response to the ebb and flow of water. Passage includes Goldsworthy's most recent commission, the Garden of Stones at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Eighteen granite boulders, varying in weight from three to fifteen tons, were hollowed out from below with a thermal lance and filled with earth. Oak trees were planted through a small hole in the top of each stone at a ceremony participated in by several Holocaust survivors. These trees, not just surviving but growing in an almost impossible situation, have powerful associations in a garden intended as a Holocaust Memorial.
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Artists Biography
Andy Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire in 1956 and was brought up in Yorkshire. He studied at Bradford College (1974-75) and Preston Polytechnic (1975-78).
After leaving college Goldsworthy lived in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. He moved over the border to Langholm, Dumfriesshire, in 1985 and to Penpont one year later. This gradual drift northwards was due to a way of life over which he did not have complete control. However, contributing factors were opportunities and desires to work in these areas and reasons of economy.
Throughout his career most of Goldsworthy's work has been made in the open air, in places as diverse as the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, Grize Fiord in the Northern Territories of Canada, the North Pole, Japan, the Australian outback, St Louis, Missouri and Dumfriesshire. The materials he uses are those to hand in the remote locations he visits: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns. Most works are ephemeral but demonstrate, in their short life, Goldsworthy's extraordinary sense of play and of place. The works are recorded as photographs. Book publication is an important aspect of Andy Goldsworthy's work: showing all aspects of the production of a given work, each publication is a work of art in its own right.
Some recent sculpture has a more permanent nature, being made in stone and placed in locations far from its point of origin, as for example Herd of Arches 1994. The series of chalk Arches made at Sculpture at Goodwood in 1995 are semi-permanent, given the fragility of the material, and are now sited indoors at Goldsworthy's studio in Dumfriesshire, to extend their life.
