Top 90 Andy Goldsworthy Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

Featured in: Nature Quotes

2. “Art is not a career – it’s a life.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

3. “The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

4. “I take the opportunity each day offers.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

6. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

8. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

9. “We often forget that we are nature...”

— Andy Goldsworthy

10. “My work comes first, reasons for it follow.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

11. “The things that I make are that which a person will make. They’re not meant to mimic nature. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

12. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

13. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

14. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

15. “Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

16. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

17. “Complete control can be the death of a work.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

18. “Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

19. “I have to understand the nature of change. And I cannot just work with stone or the more permanent materials. I need to work with leaves and ice and snow and mud and clay and water and the rising tide and the wind and all these.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

20. “You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that’s dying and something that’s being born.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

22. “Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

23. “If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

24. “Sometimes you need to stop doing something to really see it afresh.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

25. “If I’m going to understand the land, I have to understand the wind, the snow, the rain, the leaves, the ice, and changes in temperature. It just reflects a reality for me.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

26. “As you grow older you realize that art has an enormous effect. It’s frightening sometimes to think of the effect that we can have.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

27. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

28. “We leave our presence in the pavement. We’re walking over it, sitting on steps.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

30. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

31. “A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

32. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

33. “One of the beauties of art is that it reflects an artist’s entire life. What I’ve learned over the past 30 years is really beginning to inform what I make. I hope that process continues until I die.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

34. “I enjoy working in a quiet and subversive way.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

35. “It’s art that’s taught me to think and to write.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

36. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

39. “I think I have been fashioned by the fickle weather of Britain that it is – it’s forever changing. There’s no kind of constant sun or dry weather or freezing weather, and I’m always having to change and adapt to that.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

42. “Ephemeral work made outside, for and about a day, lies at the core of my art and its making must be kept private.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

43. “I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn’t walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

45. “I just see myself as an object in the final image. I know I’m experiencing it when I’m there working on it. I’m there to be worked with, as anything else that I work with.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

46. “I can’t edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

47. “I’m dealing with the most important things there are: life and nature. If this doesn’t work, if this doesn’t sustain me, I can’t go back to nature. I’m right there. There’s nowhere to go, and that frightens me.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

48. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

49. “I think that I’m always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

50. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy