Andy Goldsworthy Quotes

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.

My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.

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.

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.

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

Nature, for me is raw and dangerous and difficult and beautiful and unnerving.

I think that any sculpture is a response to its environment. It can be brought to life or put to sleep by the environment.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance.

I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do and live the way I do.

People also leave presence in a place even when they are no longer there.

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.

If I had to describe my work in one word, that word would be time.

The first snowball I froze was put in my mother's deep freeze when I was in my early 20s.

The things that I make are that which a person will make. They're not meant to mimic nature. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person.

I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames.

A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.

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

Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.

Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality.

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.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.

Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next.

My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.

Art is not a career - it's a life.

I'm not a performer, in that I don't like the public, but I work in that respect.

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.

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.

Understanding the materials I work with... gives me a deeper understanding of my place. And it's helped me make sense of the changes that are happening to me as I grow older.

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.

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.

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.

Confrontation is something that I accept as part of the project though not its purpose.

It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt.

When I do the permanent projects or the big projects, when a work is finished, that's the beginning of its life.

It's just that when I work on someone else's land, it makes me aware of the social nature of that landscape.

The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone.

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.

Fire is the origin of stone.By working the stone with heat, I am returning it to its source.

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.

The stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break.

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.

I did tests on small stones before collecting and committing myself to the larger ones.

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.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

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.

The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red.

Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear.

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.