Road Trip II - Andy Goldsworthy at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

The YSP is dedicating its 4 galleries and various outdoor locations to a major exhibition of work by Andy Goldsworthy. The London-centric art scene are rather snotty about Goldsworthy – I think they consider him twee, a country bumpkin, and worse of all, he is very,very popular, and with real people, not ICA clones with silly facial hair. I believe that his books are the bestselling art books in the market. The establishment snottiness is odd given that a lot of his work is conceptual, rather than aesthetic, and he predated the YBAs love of materials like piss, shit and blood and subjects like death and decay.

Very Damian Hirst you might think, save that Goldsworthy’s canvass is nature, particularly rural and agricultural, where such material is everyday and you cannot afford to be squeamish about it. Much of his work is temporary, designed to decay or vanish, melting snowballs, corroding damns, etc, leaving you with just the ghost, the photograph of the work in action, which make up those oh so popular books. He describes his art in terms of “actions” or “interventions”.

Some of this work leaves me cold – I saw one of his melting snowballs in a gallery a few years ago – a pile of watery mud, but at it’s best, which it is here, his work is breathtaking. The underground gallery at the YSP hosts a series of rooms each more astonishing than the last.

It begins with Stacked Oak - a perfect mound of chopped trees, beautifully, naturally curved. In the Stone Room are eleven stone domes, like an ancient village in miniature, or a futuristic settlement on the moon, or some weird agricultural practice us townies can only guess at. The top of each dome supports a wafer thin hole, the effect to make the deep dark black of the hole seem more like a felt covering.

The Clay Room is just that; the walls caked in thick mud which has cracked as it dried. The mud undulates and warps away from the wall. Rather like a Rothko, the more you look, the more you notice, luring you into a trance like state – different shades, patterning and rhythms in the cracks, your eyes start to dance.

The first thing you notice on entering the Wood Room is the deep almost astringent smell. 760 logs of coppiced chestnut curl around in a self-supporting dome, like the lair of a Tolkeinesque warlord.

The final room is simply beyond any man made artefact I have ever seen. In the Leaf Stalk Room , Goldsworthy has made a 12 metre wide “curtain” from leaf stalks held together only with blackthorns. I say curtain but it is only a filigree lattice, so fragile, and yet giving the effect of solidity. So still, yet containing within so much energy. So peaceful, yet the effort of it not falling induces anxiety, a kind of horizontal vertigo. At the centre of the curtain is a void, a hole, anti-matter, absence made whole. The piece took him two hours everyday for three months, and there was a full scale collapse midway through.


Sadly we weren't allowed to take photos, so here's a shot of the outside of the gallery, with some Goldsworthy arches - if i find any photos of these rooms I will post later.






The other galleries on this part of the site showed pictures of previous works – I was especially taken by a set of four photographs of a curved damn, each photo taken with a higher water level, so that in the third just the top of the damn walls peeks over, and in the fourth it has gone, but its line is shadowed in the different patterns the water makes either side of it.

Outside, a series called Hanging Trees featured three walled enclosures into which trees have been incorporated.




We never got to the far gallery, which hosted paintings made by sheep (with Goldsworthy’s help) and other stuff with blood and dung, nor to a couple of the more difficult to reach outdoor pieces. But the exhibition runs until January, so that’s not to say that I wont!