Best 88 quotes of Andy Goldsworthy on MyQuotes

Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures.

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.

Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it.

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

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.

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.

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.

At its most successful, my 'touch' looks into the heart of nature; most days I don't even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient - only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete.

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

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

Design implies a sense of mapping something out and then you follow the plan.

Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.

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

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

For me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches.

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.

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.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.

Ideas must be put to the test. That's why we make things; otherwise they would be no more than ideas. There is often a huge difference between an idea and its realization. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.

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

I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.

If I'm going to understand the land, I have to understand the wind, the snow, the rain, the leaves, the ice, and changes in temperature. It just reflects a reality for me.

If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different.

If you repeat something, it can become pointless. Some things can repeat and be endlessly fascinating.

If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that.

I go way beyond just the wood and stone but to the process of growth and farming and the tensions between the two.

I have six acres in front of my own house, which I very rarely work on. Most of the work occurs on farmers' fields around me. And I like the discipline of working on other people's land.

I have to understand the nature of change. And I cannot just work with stone or the more permanent materials. I need to work with leaves and ice and snow and mud and clay and water and the rising tide and the wind and all these.

I have worked with this red all over the world - in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia - a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another.

I just see myself as an object in the final image. I know I'm experiencing it when I'm there working on it. I'm there to be worked with, as anything else that I work with.

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.

I love the winter. Well, I love all the seasons, but the winter is possibly one of the most intense.

I'm an artist living in a small, Scottish village. So one would expect to be treated with some sort of caution. And the village and the farmers have shown enormous tolerance of me and interest in what I do. I mean, they don't necessarily understand what I'm doing all the time. But they, you know, I think they respect what I do and that there is a connection between what they do with the land and what I do, you know, that we're both dependent on weather and respond to that.

I'm dealing with the most important things there are: life and nature. If this doesn't work, if this doesn't sustain me, I can't go back to nature. I'm right there. There's nowhere to go, and that frightens me.

In contact with materials, I can see so much more with my hands than I can just with my eyes. I'm a participant, not a spectator. I see myself both as an object and a material, and the human presence is really important to the landscapes in which I work.

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.

I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.

I take the opportunity each day offers.

I think I have been fashioned by the fickle weather of Britain that it is - it's forever changing. There's no kind of constant sun or dry weather or freezing weather, and I'm always having to change and adapt to that.

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

I think that I'm always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see.

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

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

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.

I've laid down in dried up streambeds, leaving a shadow. And then, five minutes later, it's flash flooded, and where I once laid is now running water, which would've washed me away, you know? There's that power and danger often in places that look so calm and pastoral to begin with.

Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.

Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.

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

My approach to photograph is kept simple, almost routine. All work, good and bad, is documented. I use standard film, a standard lens and no filters. Each work grows, strays, decays-integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its height, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expresses in the image. Process and decay are implicit.