Top 90 Andy Goldsworthy Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The main source of my income is through the commissions of the large-scale works and big sculptures, the projects.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

52. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

53. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

54. “I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it’s become firewood. And there’s this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

55. “The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

56. “At its most successful, my ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature; most days I don’t even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient – only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

57. “Everything has the energy of its making inside it.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

59. “My art recognizes the human place, the human context – especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

60. “The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what’s going on and what’s happening outside.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

61. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

63. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

64. “I’m cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

65. “When I do the permanent projects or the big projects, when a work is finished, that’s the beginning of its life.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

66. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

67. “Design implies a sense of mapping something out and then you follow the plan.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

68. “I love the winter. Well, I love all the seasons, but the winter is possibly one of the most intense.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

69. “I’m very fortunate to be able to do what I do and live the way I do.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

70. “Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

71. “The British climate, although it is very wet, it is quite mild in winter. We don’t get these severe – generally don’t get severe winters.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

72. “It’s frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

74. “If you repeat something, it can become pointless. Some things can repeat and be endlessly fascinating.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

75. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

76. “There are occasions when I have moved boulders, but I’m reluctant to, especially ones that have been rooted in a place for many years.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

77. “The main reason I went to digital was because I got time-lapse, video, and still images all in one camera. Having a minimal amount of gear is really important for someone who wants to walk around. That allowed me to have this flexibility to document things in different ways.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

78. “I see my work plagiarized in gardening programmes and decorating programmes and car adverts, and I suppose I have to accept that’s just the way art gets assimilated into culture.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

79. “The early firings contained many stones.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

80. “I’m not a performer, in that I don’t like the public, but I work in that respect.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

81. “It’s just that when I work on someone else’s land, it makes me aware of the social nature of that landscape.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

83. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

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

— Andy Goldsworthy

85. “I go way beyond just the wood and stone but to the process of growth and farming and the tensions between the two.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

86. “I’ve laid down in dried up streambeds, leaving a shadow. And then, five minutes later, it’s flash flooded, and where I once laid is now running water, which would’ve washed me away, you know? There’s that power and danger often in places that look so calm and pastoral to begin with.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

87. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

88. “The first snowball I froze was put in my mother’s deep freeze when I was in my early 20s.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

89. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

90. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

91. “There’s a huge number of things that are occurring with the ice works which fascinate me enormously, but it’s driven by this kind of frantic race against time. And whilst that creates a huge amount of tension and problems, it’s a tension that I think I feed off.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

92. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

93. “If you’ve ever come across a tree that you’ve lived with for many years and then one day it’s blown over, there’s incredible shock and violence about that.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

94. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

95. “Generally in New York, people just walk over you with no problem about that. Other countries, people want to resuscitate you, like, after a bit.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

96. “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.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

97. “Fear always accompanies the making of art, generated by the shock of seeing an idea taking its form. A sculpture in the mind is safe and secure – the actual work rarely behaves as intended.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

98. “My art helps make sense of things.”

— Andy Goldsworthy

99. “A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it. It is different than patience. It is not thinking. It is working with the rhythm.”

— Andy Goldsworthy