Andy Goldsworthy: Natural Environmental Art
posted on 15 March 2011 | posted in
Arts and Entertainment
While Banksy street art gets a lot of attention in the UK, there are other notable young artists working in the UK today. For example, Andy Goldsworthy is a British artist who engages with the environment to create artworks directly from materials available on a site and assembles or collates them to produce a work specific to the site and often temporally bound so the processes of the site affect, often this destroys the work. He documents the works with still and moving images. His works vary in scale from small, quick assemblages to large permanent, planned works. The smaller works include patterns of leaves grouped by colour, icicles restuck together into corkscrews around a tree trunk, tying together daisies in a field to form a shape, grouping leaves joined together with thorns and floating them down a stream and throwing different coloured clays into a river to change the colour of it. These smaller works are usually the ephemeral ones which merely rearrange but do not alter the environment. This is taken to the extreme where he takes a photo of the dry spot shaped like himself created after he lies on a bed of stones while it rains. There is a unique feeling associated with these as often they are extrapolations of things which we ourselves do, on a smaller scale, when in the environment, and the artist merely takes them further and applies his knowledge of the site and then documents it. This makes his work very accessible and also humble. His larger, more permanent works, which usually take on the label of sculpture, include a stone fence which winds between and around trees instead of cutting a straight line through them large hollow egg shapes balanced on other stones made up with traditional stone fence building slates but in a natural and untraditional shape creating 'nests' from large pieces of driftwood which are then lifted and floated and broken up when the tide comes in.
| |
|
|