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Interview: Andy Goldsworthy on Leaning into the Wind

The artist discusses the role photography plays in his work and the sculptural nature of farming.

Interview: Andy Goldsworthy on Leaning into the Wind
Photo: Magnolia Pictures

Director Thomas Riedelsheimer, who documented some of English artist Andy Goldsworthy’s work with naturally occurring materials in 2001’s Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time, explores an even wider range of Goldsworthy’s works in Leaning Into the Wind: Andy Goldsworthy. Some are as ephemeral as the “rain shadows” that Goldsworthy often makes, lying down as a light rain starts and then getting up, leaving a crime scene-like shape of a body on the sidewalk—which the rain then fills in. Others are as lasting as the monumental project Sleeping Stones that Goldsworthy created by having huge slabs of stone fitted together and then having an oblong depression just wide enough to hold a human body hollowed out in the middle of the block.

As he pointed out in our interview, Goldsworthy’s art crystallizes the intense exploration of the world that artists have always done, taking as its subject something that’s usually part of the process. On the phone from his home in Scotland, Goldsworthy spoke easily and generously about Leaning Into the Wind and his work, often laughing or expressing enthusiastic wonder as he talked about the role photography plays in his art, pissing off the security guards at Fox News, and the sculptural nature of farming.

You often photograph or film your work, and those images are important, since they’re the only record of the ephemeral things you create. You seem to think of yourself as an artist who works in other media and takes pictures just to document what you’re doing, but doesn’t making those photos, which are powerful in their own right, feel like an artistic pursuit in itself?

It does, yes. But the aim isn’t to produce the photograph. The aim is to make the work. Sometimes the photograph is an important part of the making of the work. Brancusi said why talk about sculpture when you can photograph it? The photograph becomes a way of examining and understanding what you’ve done. The work is often about a particular time of day or a particular light. Photography’s a very important part of waiting for that moment.

There are demands from the image that I have to address, like the length of time and the composition. Two days ago, I did a work where I stood in a tree and the tree was casting shadow on the end of a building, so my shadow was on the building. I stand very still, so my shadow’s climbing the building as the sun’s going down. It was really beautiful, and quite amazing. And then I got down and I realized the battery had run out on the camera. [laughs] That happens a lot, because I’m so keen on making the work that I forget. My daughter sometimes, if I know I’m going to want some video, will come along and look after that side of things a bit. But the amount of times I’ve been out of focus, or the battery’s run out, or the memory stick’s run out, you know?

Since so much of what you do is about capturing the moment when a lot of different elements come together, it almost feels right that your camera is another element in the mix.

It’s all part of it. Yeah. [laughs] But I wouldn’t want my work to just exist within film or photography. It’s important that the work exists physically too. With a lot of the projects that I make, the things that people can go and see, the people are participants. They’re not spectators. There are passages to be walked, there are chambers to be stepped into, there are buildings to be stepped into, there are depressions in the stone to lay down in. So they actually address human nature, and actually need people to become active. Without people, they are lesser works.

You make a lot of things in this film that include room for a human body to fit into—but just barely, like the Sleeping Stones or the split wall people can walk inside of that’s so narrow you have to walk sideways at times. Is there something in those pieces about people finding a safe place in the world?

Or even turning that on its end, because some of the spaces that I make are uncomfortable to go into. There’s a room that I’ve put tree trunks inside that get denser as you go further into the room, and people don’t want to go in there because you don’t know how deep it is, is there anybody else in there, could you get lost in there? Nature, for me, isn’t just pastoral and therapeutic. It’s those things, but it’s deeply disturbing and challenging and threatening and brutal and raw as well as beautiful, and I hope that my work reflects that. I think as I get older, probably, it’s becoming more and more so.

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Your rain shadows seem to be about the impact living things have on the world. You could see them as a metaphor for the impact we have on the world when we’re alive and the way memories of us fade after we’re gone.

Yes, definitely. Just being alive, we can’t help but affect the world. Especially in a city. The city is the memory of so many people, the seats that are sat on, the places that are walked over. So the most appropriate place to lay down and leave a shadow is the pavement, that surface that’s so written by people’s feet. There have been times when I’ve made a shadow and I’ve got up and it’s carried on raining and the shadow’s disappeared, and then it’s stopped raining and, because where my body has been is slightly dryer than the rest of the pavement, it comes back again—my shadow rises up out of the ground. That’s amazing! There’s this memory coming back up out of the ground.

It’s one of those few works that I will do over and over again, because each one is so different and so interesting, so demanding. I learn so much. Like in New York, I did a series of rain shadows on the pavement. Some of the pavement is public, but a lot of it isn’t. I found that out because I was on the private side of the pavement once in front of Fox News. [laughs] And I’ve got a video of the security guards evicting me from their pavement.

YouTube video

There’s an awareness of mortality and the inevitability of change in much of your work. Is that something you’re consciously trying to surface or is it just inevitably part of any work that’s about reshaping organic materials?

I think it’s inevitably part of everything. The changes that can occur over time can be so interesting. When I go out and I work with something, there’s obviously the history of the material that I’m working with, the history of the place. There’s a moment I’m actually working with it. But to really deal with the whole spectrum of time, I have to engage with the future. And not in a way where I’m wanting to be remembered by posterity, but to launch something into the future, to see what can happen. I can learn as much from the changes that occur after the making as I can during the making.

What’s it like to work with Thomas Riedelsheimer? Did he come to you about making your two films or did you come to him?

Thomas came to me two or three years before Rivers and Tides wanting to make a film. Every so often, someone would come wanting to make a film and then they’d go away and never come back, I guess never finding funding. So I didn’t really take it too seriously, but he came back with the funding and we made the film. He’s got such an intensity and a focus and an understanding of what I’m doing, it doesn’t feel like he’s a spectator. He’s really involved in it, and that’s a really interesting dynamic. It’s just a small crew, just two or three people. He’s very alert and adapts. It’s not this prescriptive thing. He understands the way I work, and I quite enjoy his company. It’s funny, because I never ever think of this film being in the cinema, or out in the greater audience. It’s just this thing we’re making. And then it reaches this point where people are asking me questions about it [laughs] and it’s like, argh, why did it have to get to that stage? It was so interesting before. Now I have to do all these other things. And there’s only so many times you can see yourself writ large on the screen. It’s just nauseating. [laughs] I love film, generally. It’s just when I’m the subject matter that I could do without it.

So why do you agree to do it? Is it because it helps get your work out there?

No, no. It’s a collaboration. There’s an exchange that occurs between us whilst making the film that helps me to see the work differently and to think about things differently. That’s all you’re thinking about while you’re creating it. It’s certainly not motivated by “Oh, I think this will be a good career opportunity.” [laughs] In fact, that’s the negative part of it. Rivers and Tides, that was such a successful film, and it’s kind of tough because it’s only a 100-minute view of my work at that time, but people take it as being what I am. Leaning Into the Wind was a way of, amongst other things, addressing some of the misconceptions about my work, the kind of romantic view that I almost float through the landscape and don’t use machinery. Because I’m an artist who’s always made big projects, and I’m happy to work with machinery, with tools. And to be in an uncomfortable position and criticize, contradict whatever position I may have taken previously. I’m not going to stay in that comfortable territory that’s defined by a film like Rivers and Tides.

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You said you like making films because you learn something about your work when you make them. So what did you learn from this one?

It revived my interest in the videos. I’ve always done videos but mainly to do with the rain shadows. Because Thomas asked, I’d film things for him occasionally, with my daughter’s help, for Leaning Into the Wind, like the crawling through the hedge. I had two cameras set up. One was taking still images for me, and then I did this movie of it that I was going to let Thomas have. The movie images of it were great, so honest and straightforward and uncomplicated. It just shows me crawling, with all its rawness and slowness and the boredom of it, the tension and the excitement. I’ve always loved the single-shot, continuous, unedited image in art.

That sort of coincided with moving from film cameras to digital. In the early days, I had a film camera, a 35mm camera, and a Hasselblad, but it’s a lot to carry around. It’s actually more important for me to be able to walk where I want than to be limited by the kit that I’m carrying. That was a major reason why I stopped taking video cameras with me, unless I knew I was going to work with them. Well, now with the digital cameras, the same camera can do time lapse, it can do still photography, and it can do video of really high quality. That’s an amazing tool for me to have.

Your work often feels as if it sprang from nature or the collective unconscious. It reminds me of Stonehenge, and also of something a friend of mine said about some of her own art. She used to buy stuffed trophy fish in pawnshops and then paint them. She used bright colors and patterns you’d never find in nature, but they always looked just right, somehow, and she joked that she made them look the way God would have if he’d thought of it. Does that jibe at all with what you’re feeling when you create your work?

[laughs heartily] Well, I’m not motivated by any intention to improve on what’s there. I don’t think I can do that. But I’m motivated by a need to understand what’s there through making. I think the act of making is an amazing tool for understanding what’s there and establishing a connection with a place. The difference between looking and making is huge. And when I’m within that, I wouldn’t take out a box of paints and paint stuff, because I’m much more into finding the colors that are there and understanding the colors that are there—to understand the leaf and work with the leaf on the tree that it fell from. The material is a window into this lineage of growth and change, and that’s what I’m really interested in. It’s not just going out there to make images. Otherwise I could just fabricate them on the computer.

I wonder if you could make a living doing what you do if you had been born before photography was invented, since most people wouldn’t be able to see what you do at all without photography.

I guess that would be the case. I have no idea, or where it might manifest itself. But I think that experience of just experiencing the atmosphere, the place, has always been a big part of what artists do, like Turner strapping himself to the mast of a ship. And because of photography I have the ability to actually make that into a work—or a work that people can see.

Without photography, I wonder if you’d still be doing what you do but on a much smaller scale and mostly just for yourself, maybe as a farmer.

I think so. Actually, that was what I was geared up to be, what I thought my lot in life would be. Because even if I had photography, it didn’t mean that I’d be able to make a living from it. I worked on farms from about the age of 13.

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You said in the film that purpose of your art—and of your life in general—is becoming less clear as you age. Do you like that feeling of uncertainty because it opens things up more for exploration?

I think so. When you’re young, you’re so certain because you don’t know what you’re doing. I think the older you get, the less certain you are because you know more about what you’re doing. [laughs] So I think this is the time to take risks, to take chances, to experiment, to upend your notions of what should be. And then, inevitably, things happen in your life that just upend things too.

You say in the film that looking at work you did in the past reminds you of what was going on in your life when you made it. Is that just because it takes you back to that time, the way listening to a song you were playing a lot in the past takes you back? Or is the work itself influenced by what you’re going through when you make it?

I don’t think I’ve ever made a work that, say, I’m going through a divorce so I’m going to crack a rock open. [laughs] Inevitably, though, I’ve always worked, so anything happens in my life, I’ll make a work. That’s my response. Now, whether it actually looks in any way influenced by these things, I have no idea. I know when my partner was pregnant with our son, she was really close to the time of birth and I was working on the beach. And there was a round boulder just sticking out of the sand, and I did this work where I unearthed this round boulder, and then I went back and saw the pictures and I saw Tina with the fully pregnant belly and there’s me digging out this round shape. [laughs] It was pretty obvious, I guess.

What you do is so unusual that I wonder how you find your way into it. When did you first start thinking of what you did as art, rather than just climbing trees or whatever like other kids did? A lot of the work you do is so close to the way that children explore the world.

I think you’re right. Up to about the age of 17, I guess that could be said of me too, though art—in the form of drawing, painting, making things—has always been everything to me. It’s the only thing I’ve ever done. So there’s that. But when I was working on a farm, I remember one day we were collecting stones off the field, and I made a pile of stones. My brother was with me, and he started handing me stones, and this pile just took on this quality. And then the farmer came and said, “We should stick a flag on the top of that!” [laughs] Now, what was the difference between that pile of stones and just a pile of stones? You know? I guess that was my first really sculptural moment.

How old were you?

I want to say around 17. But the whole thing about working on farms was so sculptural, the mood and building of haystacks, which are big minimalist sculptures, really. You have a system to building the haystacks, with the bales, but inevitably, with any system, it starts getting erratic and stuff starts getting out of shape. Those are very sculptural lessons that would have informed me. Or plowing a field, laying a hedge, building a wall. The British landscape has been sculpted and painted by farmers for centuries. The whole kind of rawness of farming, too. It’s a tough thing to experience. It really informed me.

You do a lot of work near your home in Scotland. What is it about that area that attracts you?

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I came there 30-odd years ago because I was really poor and it was cheap to live here. I guess the reason why I’ve stayed is probably the more interesting one, because I could live anywhere, really. The landscape is great, and there’s open access to the land, which is important for an artist like me. And the people are really very tolerant. I’m English, I’m an artist, and I live in a small Scottish village, which would normally be reason to be treated as an alien. They don’t understand everything I do, but there’s a real tolerance and openness and I think even enjoyment of what I do. I tend to work not on my own land, but on other people’s land. Well, I don’t own that much land. But I also like the discipline of working on someone else’s, because it makes me aware of the social nature of the land. People think of me as being by myself, out in the wild all the time, communing with nature, but I’m often in a very public place. This isn’t my studio. This is a public place. Any time, the farmer could come by and drive over my work. [laughs] Or walkers could come by, or fishermen or hunters or whoever. I think that helps me as an artist.

Elise Nakhnikian

Elise Nakhnikian has written for Brooklyn Magazine and runs the blog Girls Can Play. She resides in Manhattan with her husband.

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