Essay on the works of Andy Goldsworthy

It is immediately evident that Goldsworthy’s works, in general, strongly accentuate texture and shape. Goldsworthy describes the working process as a tactile expression, implying the involvement of a multi-sensory extension of the body, a recurring artistic intention, especially through cues signifying touch and vision. 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. This obsession with recurring forms in nature using different materials has a ritualistic edge, where the earthworks have lost the purpose and functionalism of the commercial product.

This tactile gaze, used as the central way of identifying the object, is further evoked through the use of text. For example, in a photograph of a spherical ice ball positioned aside a bleak Autumn bridge, his texts connotes the image not only in terms of its visual impact but also the texture implied by its aural qualities: Stacked ice sound of cracking.

The shape and texture of the river in the 1988-9 Leadgate and Lambton Earthworks symbolizes its sensual form in a way which still identifies it as relating to a river, but without the non-abstracted seamless visual art representation of a river. Goldsworthy describes this process: The snake has evolved through a need to move close to the ground, sometimes below and sometimes above, an expression of the space it occupies. Similarly, rather than use the language of signposts to designate a river (in its non-place), the use of more tactile cues reclaims the spectator’s newness of vision: in Auge’s words, the traveller (AG) is recapturing the landscape like it is the first journey of birththe primal experience of differentiation.While Auge asserts that non-places exist only through the words that evoke them, AG’s words work to clarify the gaze rather than …

Tags: functionalism, landscape, nature art, paintings, photograph, the body

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