Andy Goldsworthy

"I think it's incredibly brave to be working with flowers and leaves and petals. But I have to: I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole."-Andy Goldsworthy 

Andy Goldsworthy was born on July 2, 1956 in Cheshire, England. He was home schooled until the age of 13 when he went to work on a farm as a laborer. He says that this job was one of his favorites early in life because he liked the repetitive work of the tasks that he was expected to preform. Her now equates that with his process when he makes sculpture. He is a formally trained artist; he attended Bradford Art College in England from 1974-1975 and then transferred to Lancaster Art College in 1975, where he finished out his degree in sculpture in 1978. He married Judith Gregson in 1982, they had four children before they split up. Now he lives with his partner, Tina Fisle, and Art Historian, in their Yorkshire apartment that they have owned since 1990.

After college he started developing his portfolio quite heavily by creating ephemeral works that hinged on the collaboration with nature. He had an endless supply of materials because of this, his past works have included materials such as: snow, ice, leaves, rock, clay, bark, stones, feathers, pettels, and twigs. He says that because of the ephemeral nature of his works he must record them with color photography since the real artwork is the natural decaying process that happens within his work as it gets older. 

Goldsworthy always works within the space that he finds his materials. He says that he does not want to disrupt that natural environment or ecosystem, so he never tries to go more than a mile outside of where he found his material that he wants to work with. Also, he has made himself promise that he will not change a location of one of his projects because of the weather or other threatening things. He does this because he does not want to make a mark on the environment, that is not what his work is about. His work is about finding the connection with the environment and helping others understand the nature around them a little bit better.  One thing that Goldsworthy is especially good at is capturing the life and blood of nature, the movement, the change, and the growth. He really like cataloging how things change and why they do so. This has led to one of the newest types of art, said to be created by Goldsworthy himself, Rock Balancing.  He himself does not take entire credit for the development of this genre, but instead credits nature, since that is where he ultimately gets his inspiration.

I like his work, personally because it really captivates the nature of nature itself. I like how he works purely with biodegradable materials and leaves them in their environment, to be destroyed by nature, he very thing that created it. I think that this is one of the most beautiful and, unfortunately, lost art of being an artist. The most inspiring and I guess surprising thing that I learned about him was that he catalogs all of his works as the decompose. I think that this is really beautiful because the real artwork in nature is not only how things grow, but how the Earth composts them and reuses them to make something even better and more grand.