Artist Spotlight – Andy Goldsworthy
British artist Andy Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire, England and raised in Yorkshire. Throughout his career, most of Goldsworthy’s work has been made in the open air, in diverse locations throughout the world. The materials he uses are those to hand in the remote locations he visits: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns. Most works are ephemeral but demonstrate, in their short life, Goldsworthy’s extraordinary sense of play and of place.
The shapes he works from his raw materials are basic: spiral, circle, cone, arch, column, sphere, and undulating line. Often a form will encircle a naturally occurring object, such as a tree or boulder. Other times his forms seem to play with objects, hanging from them or leading to them. Some are designed to play with light and shadow. All have the effect of integrating the area around them as part of the finished sculpture.
The Hess Persson Museum features several of Goldsworthy’s works, including Surface Tension, originally created in 1993 and reassembled on our property in 2009. The long leafstocks from a chestnut tree were wetted and then pinned together using hawthorn spines. The woody thorns hold the entire peice to the walls and ceiling no glue or hardware were used; only the thorns hold the work together. You can view a short timelapse of this painstaking process at our Youtube channel.
Another favorite in the Hess gallery is Rock Pools, created in January 2000. The piece is built from 34 kiln-fired greywacke sea boulders, greywacke being a dark, coarse-grained sandstone that contains more than 15 percent clay amalgamated with shale and silt. The boulders were fired in a kiln at just above 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, around 1,650 Celsius, to the point where the stone begins to turn molten.
Adjacent to Rock Pools you will find a viewing room with a separate but related work, a video installation that films the greywacke firing. In it you can watch the stone move through a seamless, mesmerizing transition from black to white hot and back again.
Goldsworthy rarely uses living plant material, and he does not make work meant to outlast the materials themselves. Ice is allowed to melt, leaves to fall from their thorny supports, twigs to settle as they might have on their own. That respect for time and change has made him one of the most admired figures in land art, recognized with an OBE in 2000, with permanent installations from Storm King Wall in New York to Stone River at Stanford here in California. To find his work on Mount Veeder, among the artists Donald Hess gathered over decades, feels exactly right.
Plan a visit to the Hess Persson Estate Museum to see Goldsworthy’s work in person.
A few quick questions, answered
Who is Andy Goldsworthy? A British sculptor, photographer, and land artist, born in 1956, known for ephemeral outdoor works made from natural materials as well as permanent stone installations around the world.
What Andy Goldsworthy works are at Hess Persson Estates? The Hess Art Collection includes Surface Tension, a 1993 work of chestnut leafstalks pinned with hawthorn thorns, and Rock Pools, a 2000 piece made from 34 kiln-fired greywacke boulders, along with a related video installation of the firing process.
Where can you see Andy Goldsworthy’s art in Napa? In the Hess Art Collection at Hess Persson Estates on Mount Veeder, open to the public by reservation.