A biography for Andy Goldsworthyhasn’t been written yet.
“Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality.”
“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.”
“The first stone was just tried in the spirit of experimentation. The opening of the stone was far more interesting than the drawing that I had done on it.”
“My art is an attempt to reach beyond the surface appearance. I want to see growth in wood, time in stone, nature in a city, and I do not mean its parks but a deeper understanding that a city is nature too-the ground upon which it is built, the stone with which it is made.”
“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.”
“Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There's something very powerful about finding snow in summer.”
“The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone.”
“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.”
“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 did tests on small stones before collecting and committing myself to the larger ones.”
“Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form.”
“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 realisation. I've had what I thought were great ideas that just didn't work.”
“Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.”
“Fire is the origin of stone. By working the stone with heat, I am returning it to its source.”
“Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured.”
“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.”
“The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.”