Andy Goldsworthy Quotes

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.

When I do the permanent projects or the big projects, when a work is finished, that’s the beginning of its life.

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.

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.

Everything has the energy of its making inside it.

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.

The main source of my income is through the commissions of the large-scale works and big sculptures, the projects.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.