The Art of Andy Goldsworthy: Complete Works: Special Edition (Sculptors) - Softcover

Malpas, William

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1861710593 ISBN 13: 9781861710598

Publisher: Gardners of Eastbourne, 2007

Synopsis

THE ART OF ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

This is the most comprehensive and detailed study of British artist Andy Goldsworthy, and is the only full-length exploration of Goldsworthy and his art available anywhere.

Fully illustrated, with a revised text. Bibliography and notes.

EXTRACT FROM THE CHAPTER ON GOLDSWORTHY’S LEAFWORKS

It is the leafworks that are the most colourful of Andy Goldsworthy’s sculptures. What the leaf sculptures show is how beautiful the colours of nature are: Goldsworthy shows the viewer these subtle colours by contrasting one leaf with another. Maple patch grouped the red/ orange/ yellow of Japanese maple leaves together; Poppy leaves contrasted the red poppy leaves against the mid-green of an elderberry bush; a Stone Wood sculpture of 1992 consisted of poppy leaves wrapped around a hazel branch, the red constrasting vividly with the wet green leaves; Dock Leaves interwove red leaves in green grass stalks. Two sycamore leafworks of 1980 and 1981 are very simple: a leaf black from cow shit is placed against pale Autumn leaves; another leaf, bleached white, is set down on a bed of dark leaves. He pins together two colours of sycamore leaves (sycamore is a favourite Goldsworthy medium) in Sycamore leaf sections (1988), and hangs the line of leaves from a tree. Shot with the sun behind them, the photograph of the leaves shows them glowing green and gold, the two classic colours of poetry and alchemy. The Autumnal colours of course connote nostalgia, decadence, sensuality, Romanticism, time passing, the decay of the year, and so on, all those things John Keats wrote about in his ‘Ode: To Autumn’, and in a billion other poets’ art. Goldsworthy’s aim in the leaf pieces, though, draws attention to the fragility and delicacy of leaves, as well as their strength and function. A leaf, after all, is a complex biological factory, so the natural scientists say. ‘There is a whole world in a single leaf’, remarked Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy’s leafworks do not have a scientific agenda. Rather, they celebrate the presence of leaves, the being-in-the-world of leaves, so to speak.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

William Malpas has written books on Richard Long and land art, as well as three books on Andy Goldsworthy, including the forthcoming Andy Goldsworthy In America. Malpas’s books on Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy are the only full-length studies of these artists available.

About this title

From the Publisher:

The Art of Andy Goldsworthy discusses all of Goldsworthy's important and recent exhibitions and books, including the Sheepfolds project; the Channel Four documentary; Wood (1996); and Goldsworthy's collaboration on a dance performance. This is the most comprehensive and in-depth account of Goldsworthy's art available. It is a longer and more detailed development of Malpas's previous, popular book on Goldsworthy's art.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

FROM CHAPTER 5

The eroticism of Andy Goldsworthy's sculpture is readily apparent (and one of the reasons for his art's popularity), but the sensuality of Goldsworthy's art is non-human; there are no `human' figures in his work, though there are vaginal openings, phallic rocks, mounds like breasts, cairns bulging outwards like pregnant bellies, and stalks that bend gracefully like ballet dancers: if one wants to anthropomorphize and sexualize Goldsworthy's art, it's easy. Goldsworthy himself anthropomorphizes his work. He says the cones on a hillside are like sentinels or a group of people (Sh, 17). Goldsworthy spoke of stones and seeds in terms of phallic tumescence and orgasmic release: `I found an energy in stone that can best be described as a seed that becomes taut as it ripens - often needing only the slightest of touch to make it explode and scatter its parts' (W, 23). Goldsworthy has made more `traditional' forms of art in galleries: his bracken, fern and horse chestnut stalk works, for instance, were made by pinning the materials onto white gallery walls. These works - Bracken fronds (Ecology Centre, London, 1985), Reeds, bracken and horse chestnut stalks (Centre d'Art Contemporain, Castres, and Galerie Aline Vidal, Paris, 1989) and Reed line drawing (Paris, 1990) - were essentially free, open wall drawings, often employing basic motifs such as the circle and open curve. Hanging screens of plants that Goldsworthy made in galleries include the Susuki grass and Horse chestnut leaf stalks (both made in Japan in 1993), Horse chestnut leaf stalks (1994, Japan), Yucca blades (New Mexico, 2000), and Rushes thorns (1992, San Francisco). Willowherb (1990) was crafted in Goldsworthy's studio.

About this edition

• Publisher: Gardners of Eastbourne
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1861710593
• ISBN 13: 9781861710598
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400