Andy Goldsworthy

Goldsworthy is the grandfather of impermanent nature art, creating one-of-a-kind ephemeral sculptures out of snow and ice, stone and twigs, leaf and bark. This book carries the quiet intensity of his art that lives at the edge of decay and change. The book wove me into a world of understanding the impermanence in nature through the lens of art being created on the precipice of change. He sculpts spiraling ice crystals just at the time in the morning when the temperature would permit and builds stone structures at the edge of the water, just before the tide would come in… show more.

Goldsworthy is an English artist and environmentalist who uses natural materials - woven birch, frosted oak and sycamore branches, a boulder sheathed in poppy leaves, hollowed-out damp sand - to create land sculptures, assemblages, and site installations in fields, forests, and lakesides. When I first came across his beautifully ephemeral work - snow melts, leaves decay, a wave disintegrates sand - it made me realize that a gardener needs to appreciate the beauty of all the seasons. His work has helped me to redefine my definition of a garden’s death which is rather nature’s dormant phase; its period of transition… show more.