Top 112 Quotes & Sayings by Andy Goldsworthy

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

The first snowball I froze was put in my mother's deep freeze when I was in my early 20s.

Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.

People also leave presence in a place even when they are no longer there.

Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next.

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.

People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city.

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 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 stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break.

Three or four stones in one firing will all react differently. I try to achieve a balance between those that haven't progressed enough and those about to go too far.

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.

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.

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

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.

The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red.

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.

I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames.

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

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.

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 have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball.

Once the fired stone is out of the kiln, it is still possible to mentally reconstruct it in its original form.

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.

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

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

The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.

I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.

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.

Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned.

The early firings contained many stones.

People are the nature of the city, and you can feel it in the pavement.

The underlying tension of a lot of my art is to try and look through the surface appearance of things. Inevitably, one way of getting beneath the surface is to introduce a hole, a window into what lies below.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Time gives growth, it gives continuity and it gives change. And in the case of some sculptures, time gives a patina to them.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

Nature, for me is raw and dangerous and difficult and beautiful and unnerving.

When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance.

My sculpture can last for days or a few seconds - what is important to me is the experience of making. I leave all my work outside and often return to watch it decay.

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.

Understanding the materials I work with... gives me a deeper understanding of my place. And it's helped me make sense of the changes that are happening to me as I grow older.

When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.

When I was at art school, a lot of art education is about art being a means of self-expression, and as an 18-year-old I didn't know if I had a huge amount I wanted to express. It was a big moment when I decided I wanted to shift the emphasis or the intention of my art from something I disgorged myself upon and something that actually fed me or made me see the world or understand the world.

There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things.

If I had to describe my work in one word, that word would be time.

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.

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

We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.

I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.

We often forget that we are nature.