Mia maxima culpa. For many years I felt it wasn’t cool to like Andy Goldsworthy. The British artist’s interventions in and workings with nature, while highly skilful and often very beautiful, seemed out of kilter with an increasingly hardcore, conceptually underpinned and urban-orientated art world. It also didn’t help that most of his work could only be experienced at one remove. Books and photographs were the only record of the ephemeral pieces he’d created from ice, leaves, sticks and stones; as well as of the more lasting installations—walls, sheepfolds, cairn paths and giant arches—he’d make in situ, usually in remote locations across the world.
But recently two Goldsworthy encounters—one at Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years’, his major survey at the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, and the other at Jupiter Artland, where he has four permanent works on show—have radically changed my view. Not only do both these manifestations reveal his work to be tougher, darker, more emotionally charged and widely referential than I had hitherto realised, but also within the context of the ever-escalating climate and ecological crisis, Goldsworthy’s profound but light touch engagement with the natural world now seems utterly appropriate to our times.