As we have said from time to time, one reason we retired and moved to Europe was to be able to take advantage of last minute events and exhibitions.
Back in June a little notice floated across our ‘feed’ and we immediately took notice. Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, July 26 through November 2 at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. As a bonus, it coincided with a week when a new friend from the States was going to visit Edinburgh. After 30 seconds of making sure we had time on our calendar, we bought tickets (we didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come, we just got her a ticket). After seeing one of the best exhibits of our lives, we are so glad.
Hailed as a genius, Goldsworthy’s art is ephemeral, site-specific, and transient. He works with leaves, reeds, trees, stones, flowers, and water both flowing and frozen. He is internationally renowned for building, weaving, floating and folding natural materials from leaf to fern, snow to sand and then walking away, letting the installations dissolve back into the land they were built from. He documents his creations in vivid photographs, mapping, inspecting, and recording the everyday wonders of nature.
The Royal Scottish Academy building is an unusual venue for an artist like Goldsworthy. Built in 1826 it has Greek columns and is thoroughly neo-classical in its design. yet, when talking about setting up the exhibition, Goldsworthy simply noted that nature exists everywhere, not just in rural spaces, it doesn’t stop at the city boundary.
For him, the land is raw and he enjoys the hard manual labor of his creations. “The land may look pastoral and picturesque, but it’s a brutal place, the farm a tough place. Sheep make the Scottish landscape.” Thus, the carpet of raw fleece going up the long stairs from the entry and ending at a pair of marble columns wrapped in barbed wire. The fleece is softly inviting, yet closer inspection reveals the dirt and vegetation trapped within the fleece, dotted by the paint used by farmers to note age and final disposition of the sheep. “That wire fence is about the difficulties and obstructions which every artist has to face, especially one that works in the land. But it is also about finding a way through.”
Atop the polished fine oak of the flooring, Goldsworthy piled fallen oak branches, windfall salvaged from Dumfriesshire fields (where he lives), arranged in a dramatic passage you must walk through. “We are bound up in the land. Look at your dining room table. There is a disconnect nowadays between us and the land.”
His most spectacular room installation is of 10,000 reeds or bullrushes suspended from its skylights. Pictures do not convey the sheer grandeur of this installation, provoking a cathedral-like sense of sacred. Using only natural light, reed mace (bullrushes) from Scottish lochs was used to create this curtained chamber that you can step into and feel the light change.
A simple room of stones speaks eloquently of our deepest connection to the earth. The stones are dug out, not under a hedge or around a cow barn, but from grave sites, including that of his wife. “My former wife Judith died in 2008 and when I was visiting her grave, I noticed there was a pile of stones by the cemetery wall. And I discovered they’re found in every cemetery, displaced from digging graves,” he says. “So when a body goes into the earth, there are always some stones left over. There’s an exchange between the body and the land and I thought that was very powerful.” He collected the stones from hundreds of gravesites across the region over nearly three years.
Judith Gregson, a ceramicist from the Potteries, and her father also inspired the wall of cracked red mud in the exhibition, which took 20 people to make and ten days to dry. Like much of his work, it looks effortless, but it is far from it. The catalogues notes that red earth is used by local farmers to mark the sheep and its distinctive color comes from the high iron content of the earth, which we share in our blood. On the wall next to Red Wall are three monitors playing a video of the artist cleaning a rock with the red clay literally bleeding into the stream. A visceral connection of blood, iron, water, and earth. Stunning.
In another room, a video of him “washing” his hands with blackberries links to this imagery.
Nearby, a video of his “Hedge walk” plays. In an interview for The Guardian, he talks about how his performance pieces are uncomfortable because he is not a performer. “They are very personal acts done in an often public place.” Hedge walking is “pretty brutal”, he admits. “I came out of one or two of those feeling pretty beaten up. But what a beautiful thing to do. Swimming through a hedge.” He’s probably retired from hedge walking, however. “You only do them while they are giving you something. The intention of my work has always been to understand my relationship with the land. I don’t go out to improve what is there. But I do feel this need to be a participant, working with it, learning about it. Art has an amazing ability to open your eyes to what’s around you – such as the hedge. Maybe that’s what art is. It just takes you somewhere you’ve never thought of going, whether it’s in the mind or the world.”
I particularly enjoyed the lower gallery area which had many images from his early works, going back to the late 1970s.
All images copyright Lisa McSherry, 2025, except where noted.
A .pdf of the Exhibition Guide is here.
More photos are here, including many taken during the installation, which offer a fascinating glimpse into the process of creation.
