Unnatural Nature

ENTWINES
NATURE INTO
ARTWORKS
Before I meet Andy Goldsworthy, I have a wander round the retrospective of his
work being constructed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield.
Goldsworthy creates moments of wonder out of local rocks and earth and trees, and
this wandering prompts several questions, which I jot down in my notebook: are all
farm animals abstract expressionists? Is one dry-stone waller’s work distinguishable
from another’s? Just how do you suspend these three oak trees in mid-air below
ground in the middle of a field? And, is sheep shit more user-friendly (for smearing
on gallery windows) than cow shit?
Goldsworthy is 50 and, as these questions suggest, back in his element. Lately, the
British countryside’s most engaging propagandist has been pursuing his vision all
across the world. He has made unlikely cairns in Des Moines, a monumental
Holocaust memorial in New York (for which he planted oak trees in giant boulders).
A return to the green, green grass of home feels overdue. He grew up not too far
from here, on the Harrogate side of Leeds, in a house edging the green belt. He was
a guest artist at this sculpture park way back in 1983, when he was still asking himself
whether there might be a career at all in making piles of stones off the beach
look like Brancusis or in taking vast Scottish snowballs down to London and observing
them melt.
In the time since, he has collected a team of craftsmen and labourers who follow him
around the globe, humping wood and carving stone. This morning I come across
several of them, working in small groups on the various ingenious constructions that
Goldsworthy has set in motion. Five men are out in a copse making a circular drystone
structure that will obstruct a right of way and offer no entry or exit; a stubborn
comment on the Enclosure Act of 1801, among other things. The foreman, Gordon
Wilson, is on the phone to Goldsworthy, clarifying whether the copestones of the
enclosure will be done in the Yorkshire style, rough and ready, or the
Nottinghamshire, curved; another group on a different hill is making a complex
sheep pen.
Dave’s patience has not been in vain. His crafted pens of quarried rock have at their
centre an eight-and-a-half-ton block of sandstone on which visitors will be invited
to make ‘rain shadows’; this process will involve waiting for a likely looking rain
cloud and then, as the first drops begin to fall, lying full length on the rock and
allowing a body-shaped silhouette to form, which the prostrate pilgrim will photograph
and contribute to an archive. I imagine a queue of cagoule-clad ramblers
gazing at the horizon, invoking drizzle. The perfect English day out.
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