Andy Goldsworthy Quotes
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I've laid down in dried up streambeds, leaving a shadow. And then, five minutes later, it's flash flooded, and where I once laid is now running water, which would've washed me away, you know? There's that power and danger often in places that look so calm and pastoral to begin with.
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I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. 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.
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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.
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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.
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The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material.
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Art is not a career - it's a life.
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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.
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I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that's just the way art gets assimilated into culture.
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A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it. It is different than patience. It is not thinking. It is working with the rhythm.
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Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next.
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The main source of my income is through the commissions of the large-scale works and big sculptures, the projects.
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People also leave presence in a place even when they are no longer there.
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When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance.
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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.
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I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment.
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The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.
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Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit.
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People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.
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There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things.
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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.
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If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that.
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I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.
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Sometimes you need to stop doing something to really see it afresh.
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If you repeat something, it can become pointless. Some things can repeat and be endlessly fascinating.
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In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.
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Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear.
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When I do the permanent projects or the big projects, when a work is finished, that's the beginning of its life.
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Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.
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I just see myself as an object in the final image. I know I'm experiencing it when I'm there working on it. I'm there to be worked with, as anything else that I work with.
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I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames.
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