Andy Goldsworthy quotes

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 realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work. (Andy Goldsworthy)

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

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

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

Andy Goldsworthy

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

Andy Goldsworthy

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

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

Andy Goldsworthy

My work comes first, reasons for it follow.

Andy Goldsworthy

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

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

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)

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

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. 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. It's as if the whole of winter has drained through that white hole - a concentration of winter.

Andy Goldsworthy

I find some of my new works disturbing, just as I find nature as a whole disturbing. The landscape is often perceived as pastoral, pretty, beautiful – something to be enjoyed as a backdrop to your weekend before going back to the nitty-gritty of urban life. But anybody who works the land knows it's not like that. 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

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

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.

Andy Goldsworthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Goldsworthy

Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.

Andy Goldsworthy

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

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