Comment | I used to think it wasn’t cool to like Andy Goldsworthy—now I see how he helps us appreciate the natural world

Mia maxima culpa. For many years I felt it wasn’t cool to like Andy Goldsworthy. The British artist’s interventions in and workings with nature, while highly skilful and often very beautiful, seemed out of kilter with an increasingly hardcore, conceptually underpinned and urban-orientated art world. It also didn’t help that most of his work could only be experienced at one remove. Books and photographs were the only record of the ephemeral pieces he’d created from ice, leaves, sticks and stones; as well as of the more lasting installations—walls, sheepfolds, cairn paths and giant arches—he’d make in situ, usually in remote locations across the world.

But recently two Goldsworthy encounters—one at Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years’, his major survey at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the other at Jupiter Artland, where he has four permanent works on show—have radically changed my view. Not only do both these manifestations reveal his work to be tougher, darker, more emotionally charged and widely referential than I had hitherto realised, but also within the context of the ever-escalating climate and ecological crisis, Goldsworthy’s profound but light touch engagement with the natural world now seems utterly appropriate to our times.

A focus for tension and beauty

There’s certainly nothing whimsical about Wool Runner (2025), the wide smelly strip of unkempt sheep’s wool that runs up the middle of the grand staircase of the National Gallery of Scotland’s Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), ushering visitors into the show. This unusual carpet runner is made from untreated fleeces which have been marked with the brilliantly coloured spray-painted blotches used by farmers to colour code their flocks, gathered and then joined together by Goldsworthy. Next, at the top of the stairs, there’s a dense barrier of rusty recycled barbed wire, twisted between and around two central classical columns, which has to be circumnavigated to gain access to the upstairs galleries.

It’s a far from welcoming beginning that speaks ambiguously of how we use the land, with Goldsworthy describing the barbed wire Fence (2025)—a rare sortie into manmade metal—as “a focus for the tension and the beauty that I feel is in both the building and the landscape”. But let’s not forget that from his mid teens and throughout much of his student years this artist worked as a farmhand, so his relationship with the land has been unsentimental from the get go. Or that his experience of the arduous and repetitive digging, building, stacking, gathering and sorting that came with the job has fed directly into his art.

These days he still rarely uses assistants and is happier working with farmers, landowners, foresters and the builders of drystone walls than with curators and gallerists. But he’s also no rural innocent and has worked in cities across the world, including making rain shadows on the pavements of New York. He has also installed giant snowballs throughout the city of London and, more lastingly, created the sculptural Roof from slate for Washington’s National Gallery of Art in 2004-5 and Garden of Stones in New York’s Museum of Jewish Heritage in 2003.

A forest in a house

According to Goldsworthy, the current RSA exhibition is one single artwork, made in response to the 200-year-old building, its spaces, materials, light, and character. Among the dramatic new commissions for in the upstairs galleries is Oak Passage (2025), which is just that, a straight path which cuts through a high tangle of wind-fallen oak trees and boughs, many of which had been felled by Storm Éowyn at the beginning of this year. These unruly branches form a potent reminder that the oak floorboards upon which they sit were once living trees, with Goldsworthy considering the floor to be an integral part of the piece. “I want to see the forest in a house and the house in a forest,” he says.

The structure of the RSA building also dictates the form of Skylight (2025), a shimmering sculptural curtain of more than 10,000 grey-brown dried bullrushes. These hang down from the edges of the central skylight in long rows of vertical lines, their bulbous seed heads removed and constantly changing colour under the natural light. By contrast, an adjoining room is emphatically earthbound and impossible to enter, with a floor completely covered in rocks of all sizes. The work, titled Gravestones, is a mass of rubble made up of stones displaced by multiple burials, and gathered by Goldsworthy from more than a hundred graveyards across the south west of Scotland. The rock-filled room thus becomes a charged memento mori, viewed by Goldsworthy as “a deeply moving and humbling reaffirmation of life, which has given me a different perspective on the land and our connection to it”.

Throughout this show the interrelationship of humans and land is reasserted in myriad ways. Red Wall (2025) covers more than 35 sq. m of gallery wall in a thick layer of cracked, dried clay made from the rich red earth near Goldsworthy’s Dumfriesshire home. Like our human blood, it owes its vivid colour to a high iron content, which for Goldsworthy underlines the fact “that we are bound to the earth”.

An anti-flag project

A different kind of earthly allegiance is addressed in Flags (2020), originally made for the Rockefeller Centre in New York. Here the flags of each of the 50 American states have been replaced by a blank banner, dyed with what Goldsworthy describes as “the reddest earth I could get from that state”. The result is a room-high procession of hanging textiles in earthy, ruddy shades ranging from a pale tawny yellow to a deep vivid orange. “I hoped these flags would transcend borders and that they would mark a different kind of defence of the land… rather than show the emblem of each state and what separates them, it’s about the earth and what connects them,” says Goldsworthy, who describes the piece as “an anti-flag project in many ways”.

Again and again we are reminded that the rural landscape is no romantic idyll, and that it can offer astonishing beauty but also pain, peril and discomfort. In the name of art Goldsworthy gets coated in mud, soaked in surf, and films himself in mid winter crawling with excruciating slowness through the thorny centre of a hawthorn hedge. One wall panel declares that he feels “a deep insecurity in nature. A natural, violent and unpredictable energy”.

Whether in the recent large scale commissions or in the films and photographs of works dating back to the mid 1970’s that are presented in the RSA’s lower galleries, there’s a pervasive sense of drama, danger and physical exertion. Even the most exquisite juxtapositions of torn leaves or delicately balanced shards of ice were often made in extreme weather conditions, while paintings have been created out of the blood of a hare accidentally hit by a car, or by the muddy hooves of sheep clustered around a mineral block. On one especially beautiful 1982 photograph of a dramatic zig-zag of split feathers taken from a dead heron, Goldsworth has written: “Heron smelling, had to hold breath when plucking.”

Hidden or unacknowledged

When the RSA show ends in November, all its components will either vanish back into the land or be recycled—Gravestones, for instance, is destined to be part of a larger permanent piece to be installed on the Scottish estate of the Duke of Buccleuch. But just outside Edinburgh at Jupiter Artland, Goldsworthy maintains a powerful and lasting presence with four permanently-installed commissions all dating from 2009. Each of these engage with their surroundings in striking and unexpected ways. In Stone House (Bonnington) a simple stone bothy has been built over a chunk of excavated bedrock, which erupts uncannily into the dark space of the house in a turbulent and decidedly undomestic manner. This dramatic intervention was achieved by simply removing the topsoil to expose and then frame the bedrock that had lain underneath for millenia. “Hidden or not understood or acknowledged,” as Goldsworthy puts it.

The coppicing of trees, which involves periodically cutting down to a stump to encourage the growth of new shoots, is a central part of estate management. It also plays a key role in Goldsworthy’s three other Jupiter Artland works. Near the café is Clay Tree Wall, an entire felled tree has been laterally attached to the wall by a thick membrane of local clay mixed with hair taken from friends, family and employees of Jupiter Artland. Over time the clay’s surface has dried and cracked to form a lattice of fissures, reminiscent of veins and other webs of exchange and communication linking both the human and the natural world.

Then deeper into the woods Goldsworthy has created what he describes as a Stone Coppice, whereby thirty large, locally sourced boulders have been wedged into the branches of living trees. Due to the coppicing process, these trees form a basket-like cradle close to the ground. It’s a work in perpetual change as the enveloping branches grow around the rocks at their centre, while also lifting the rocks higher above the ground.

The preciousness of the natural world

In Coppice Room, the fourth and arguably most dramatic of Jupiter Artland’s works, a derelict windowless outhouse has been filled with a mass of tree trunks vertically extending from floor to ceiling. A few feet inside the trees become too densely crowded to permit any further penetration and it is disconcertingly impossible to gauge how far back they extend into the gloom. Crossing this modest threshold is like being unexpectedly transported into the dark heart of a forest, with Goldsworthy simply saying that here, as always, he wants his works “to speak for themselves”.

This is what I now see his work does, in ways that are often rich in potential but implicit in meaning and metaphor. Goldsworthy views everything he makes, large and small, permanent or ephemeral, as a means of “learning to make sense of the world”. And, through his often gruelling investigations, he helps us to appreciate the power and the preciousness of what surrounds us, too.