Blog Task: Andy Goldsworthy

"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." -Andy Goldswothy



Andy is an artist who collaborates with nature to make his creations – flowers, icicles, leaves, mud, pinecones, snow, stone, twigs and thorns. He regards his creations as transient. As nature will eventually grow and decay, the state of change and transience are what he aimed to reflect in his work.

In Pebbles, Broken and Scraped, pebbles are being arranged in a spiral motion towards the centre with decreasing sizes. On top of each pebble, there are white lines (perhaps charcoal) scraped alongside the split that goes down the spiral formation.

With a sand background, it shows that Andy is working in the area where his materials are.

His intention is probably to work with the landscape instinctively regardless of the change in nature which could make his works quite short-lived.

As seen in Ice Spiral Treesoul, the ice would no doubt melt as soon as the temperature increased. Therefore, most viewers could only look at his work through photographs, which is also the only way to document and capture the state of transience of nature besides videography.







When Sharon, Xin Yu and I began on the task to create an artwork showing Andy Goldsworthy’s influence, we came to an agreement that geometrical shapes and mathematical ideas are probably the most prominent feature in most of his works.

For example, in this work below, he employed the elements of design such as positive and negative spaces, symmetry etc to create a balanced and harmonious work with twigs and water.

While choosing our materials, we considered human bodies, stools that can be found in the art room. But we eventually decided on stationeries as they are easier to work with.

Using the pens and pencils as twigs, we arranged them around a bottle with a circular base. And this is how it looks without the bottle. By doing it on the table, we are trying to show the influence of on-site art making - to do art at where our materials are found. In addition, the variety of colours used apart from his simplistic dull colours, is an extension from his idea of nature to the recent era whereby ready-mades are readily accessible to students like us today.