![]() ![]() And so I'm filling where the tree used to be with stone. ![]() It's like half the trunk still remains - or two-thirds of it does, up to about 10 feet. GROSS: So you're building a stone wall in a decaying tree trunk? And it might be that I never succeed with that work. So it's a - that's a process of stone by stone, getting to understand the stone a little better each time and getting a little higher each time and then these inevitable collapses. And it now is still standing in Scotland - or not standing, part of it is standing in a pile of its own debris, waiting for me to return. And so far I've only reached about 7 feet. And it's in a stump of a fallen oak tree, which I've tried to build a dry stone wall in the side of. There's always this tension and overcoming of problems and difficulties.Īnd this last week, I've been rather unusually maybe sort of obsessed with just one particular work, and I've worked on it for a week. These come raw from the ground and have all the irregularities and peculiarities that - because of that. You know, this isn't paint out of a park - all materials from a lumberyard or a stone yard. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material. And the process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. And so in the making of a work - layer by layer, stone by stone, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, petal by petal - one being added to the next, you are - something grows in front of me. And the process of making parallels that of growth. I mean, design implies a sense of mapping something out and then you follow the plan. The process is not one that I feel is one of design. GOLDSWORTHY: I can get pretty - I get very determined. GROSS: What you do definitely seems to have an element of obsession on a basic level, like, gathering leaves that are the exact same shade of yellow so that you can design with them, like arrange them in a certain way or almost paint with them in a certain way, or collecting the right number of rocks of a certain shape that you need to build something or putting pieces of ice together so, like, icicles suddenly take on a spiraling shape instead of the shape that they naturally had. And the intention is, as I said, not to mimic nature but to understand it. So they are about the human nature and the human touch and involvement with the world around me. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person. So is that fair?ĪNDY GOLDSWORTHY: Well, the things that I make are that which a person will make. I think of you as using things that occur in the natural world, using that as your raw material, whether it's like, you know, leaves or stone or ice or twigs, but using these naturally-occurring things in ways that don't quite look natural (laughter). Goldsworthy has also made temporary museum installations at The Getty in Los Angeles and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. A new book collects photos of his ephemeral works from 2004 to 2014. That's the only way most of us will ever get to see his ephemeral work. And since some of the work can melt, blow away, get washed away or collapse, photographic documentation is essential. His art is partly formed and changed by the weather, time and decay. His materials include stone, grass, leaves, ice, trees, rivers, streams. They're examples of my guest Andy Goldsworthy's art. These natural yet unnatural forms are both beautiful and unsettling. Imagine walking through the woods and finding what looks like a giant spider web fashioned of twigs hanging from a tree, or a stone wall with a large row of sheets of ice stood on end across the top of the wall, or a dead tree dusted with chalk, giving the tree a ghostly appearance. ![]()
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