Andy Goldsworthy Quotes and Sayings - Page 1

“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

#Connections #Forget #Lost

“Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change. And in the case of some sculptures, time gives a patina to them.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Time #Giving #Growth

“Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Winter #Snow #Childhood

“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

#Rocks #Ice #Trying

“Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Winter #Snow #Special

“Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Interesting #Able #Sometimes

“The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Essence #Drawing

“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

#Differences #Theatre #Energy

“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

#Art #Mean #Cities

“Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Winter #Artist #Years

“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 Goldsworthy

#Art #Lying #Trying

“I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Rocks #Want #Sticks

“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.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Keys #Light

“When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Important #Trying #Stones

“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 realization. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Ideas #Differences #Would Be

“Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Rain #Independent #Rocks

“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

#Photography #Distance #Way

“Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Artist #Elements #Splits

“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

#Summer #Nature #Powerful

“I have worked with this red all over the world - in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia - a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Running #Artist #Japan

“Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Artist #Night #Gone

“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

#Animal #Energy #Way

“Fire is the origin of stone.By working the stone with heat, I am returning it to its source.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Fire #Stones #Heat

“Three or four stones in one firing will all react differently. I try to achieve a balance between those that haven't progressed enough and those about to go too far.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Balance #Trying #Three

“The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Blood #Iron #Stones

“Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Beauty #Pain

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

#Light #Blood #Growth

“Time confined into blind caves or extended through tunnels, responds to the call of infinity, which teases with its promise of freedom. outside the body, time is a pair of compasses in the hands of eternity, but inside it is a pendulum, fastened to the heart. the heart takes its measure from the lengthening swing of the pendulum surveying what time is left. in its own rhythm time spreads itself wildly here and there and is crippled elsewhere. its unequally distributed weight wounds my body - that is how the particularities of my life are manifest.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Heart #Hands #Tunnels

“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

#Journey #Snow #Quality

“As you grow older you realize that art has an enormous effect. It's frightening sometimes to think of the effect that we can have.”
-- Andy Goldsworthy

#Art #Thinking #Aging