Andy Goldsworthy
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.Collection: Ideas
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.Collection: Art
Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change. And in the case of some sculptures, time gives a patina to them.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Simple
I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment.Collection: Sleep
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.Collection: Giving
I think that I'm always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see.Collection: Thinking
If you repeat something, it can become pointless. Some things can repeat and be endlessly fascinating.Collection: Repeats
If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different.Collection: Rain
The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.Collection: Art
The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.Collection: Photography
Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it.Collection: Art
Art is not a career - it's a life.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Art
I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.Collection: Materials
It's art that's taught me to think and to write.Collection: Art
My work comes first, reasons for it follow.Collection: Firsts
I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.Collection: Cutting
I'm not a performer, in that I don't like the public, but I work in that respect.Collection: Performers
The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material.Collection: Land
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.Collection: Art
Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Important
The main reason I went to digital was because I got time-lapse, video, and still images all in one camera. Having a minimal amount of gear is really important for someone who wants to walk around. That allowed me to have this flexibility to document things in different ways.Collection: Important
I love the winter. Well, I love all the seasons, but the winter is possibly one of the most intense.Collection: Winter
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.Collection: Trying
We often forget that we are nature.Collection: Forget
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.Collection: Heart
When I was at art school, a lot of art education is about art being a means of self-expression, and as an 18-year-old I didn't know if I had a huge amount I wanted to express. It was a big moment when I decided I wanted to shift the emphasis or the intention of my art from something I disgorged myself upon and something that actually fed me or made me see the world or understand the world.Collection: Art
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.Collection: Country
The things that I make are that which a person will make. They're not meant to mimic nature. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person.Collection: Hands
People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.Collection: Cities
I've laid down in dried up streambeds, leaving a shadow. And then, five minutes later, it's flash flooded, and where I once laid is now running water, which would've washed me away, you know? There's that power and danger often in places that look so calm and pastoral to begin with.Collection: Running
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.Collection: Fall
I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do and live the way I do.Collection: Able
I'm an artist living in a small, Scottish village. So one would expect to be treated with some sort of caution. And the village and the farmers have shown enormous tolerance of me and interest in what I do. I mean, they don't necessarily understand what I'm doing all the time. But they, you know, I think they respect what I do and that there is a connection between what they do with the land and what I do, you know, that we're both dependent on weather and respond to that.Collection: Mean
My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.Collection: Art
I think I have been fashioned by the fickle weather of Britain that it is - it's forever changing. There's no kind of constant sun or dry weather or freezing weather, and I'm always having to change and adapt to that.Collection: Thinking
If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that.Collection: Years
When it does get below freezing and there is - it's cold enough for ice to form, then that changes the whole landscape, and it makes the landscape a different landscape to the one that I worked with previously. And I want to understand that. But the big tension of the ice works is that they're often made when it's cold enough to freeze one piece of ice to another.Collection: Ice
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.Collection: Thinking
Design implies a sense of mapping something out and then you follow the plan.Collection: Design
I take the opportunity each day offers.Collection: Opportunity
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.Collection: Art
I just see myself as an object in the final image. I know I'm experiencing it when I'm there working on it. I'm there to be worked with, as anything else that I work with.Collection: Finals
Sometimes you need to stop doing something to really see it afresh.Collection: Needs
When I do the permanent projects or the big projects, when a work is finished, that's the beginning of its life.Collection: Projects
It's just that when I work on someone else's land, it makes me aware of the social nature of that landscape.Collection: Land