Goldsworthy comes to COA
Andy Goldsworthy (right) and Steve Haynes, founder of The Maine Granite Industry Historical Society and Museum in Mount Desert. Credit: Darron Collins.
English sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy visited COA in the fall of 2021. Goldsworthy gave a fascinating and wide-ranging talk and slide show featuring art he created during the COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 and 2021. While most of the world was hunkered down working remotely, Goldsworthy was engaged in creating work in and around his property in Penpont, Scotland. For Goldsworthy, who is used to traveling internationally to create work, being locked down was something new but also oddly rooted in how he approaches working: “I’ve always said the best way to understand change—and my art is about change—the best way to understand change is by staying in the same place.” The following quotations are from Goldsworthy’s talk at COA.
“The way something changes and decays is as important as the way it’s made. And I learn as much about the material and the place as it decays as when I make the work. And that is the essential driving force… It is the reason why I make my art.
When I make things, I learn about them, I understand them, I have a connection to them. It’s a knowledge that can only be gained by touching and by working. I’m not trying to improve what is there, I can’t do that, but I do feel this deep need to be involved in the land.
As I said before, It’s not like I’m trying to illustrate some political or environmental issue with my work. The work is an environmental issue. I am an environmental issue. I live and breathe that.”
“It’s not like these works are illustrating some political view. They are about trying…they come out of trying to figure things out, which is what I do when I make art. I’m trying to figure things out, trying to understand what’s going on. What’s in front of me, the weather, the light, the stone.”
“There’s always this leap into the unknown for me… But it’s quite extraordinary, the solutions that can arise.”
