The British artist Andy Goldsworthy moved to Penpont, a village in southwest Scotland, in 1986, when he was thirty. The area’s initial appeal was twofold. Property was cheap, which meant that Goldsworthy and his wife at the time, Judith Gregson, could acquire an unrenovated stone building that had likely once stored grain. This structure could serve as a workspace and, for a while, as a rough-and-ready home. Of equal importance to Goldsworthy was the existence in Scotland of a customary right to roam. He could move freely through the surrounding farmland, traversing sheep-grazed hills divided by stone walls and crossing wooded streams. The environment was Goldsworthy’s true studio. He makes art using natural materials—stacked stones, interlaced leaves, threaded wool—that might take hours to create and then only moments to evanesce.
Goldsworthy, who grew up close to Leeds, in the North of England, has remained in Penpont for forty years. Its hills are marked with the traces of what he calls his “ephemeral work,” including an elm tree that fell across the downhill course of a stream a quarter century ago and which, as it has decayed, Goldsworthy has used as both a sculptural form and a palette, in an endless variety of ways. He has plastered a fracture in the bark with vivid yellow leaves, creating a boltlike gash; he has filled its crevices with snagged sheep’s wool, in a simulacrum of snow.
Goldsworthy has made cunning edits of the landscape throughout Penpont. He has inscribed local stone walls with yellow lines assembled from the heads of dandelions. Some two decades ago, he built a cairn with pieces of sandstone. As tall as a man and immersed in a sea of bracken, it is now covered in moss and disappears from sight amid summertime growth, only to reëmerge when winter arrives.
The testing ground of Penpont also generates ideas that Goldsworthy translates into large-scale permanent works in distant locations. His projects include stone walls that snake across a landscape, like the one at the Storm King Art Center, in New York’s Hudson Valley, and ochre-colored rammed-earth walls that resemble ancient earthworks, as in an installation for a private museum in San Francisco. Such commissions can take Goldsworthy away from Scotland for months at a time, and during his travels he yearns to be nearer to his source of inspiration. “Change is best understood by staying in the same place, and it takes a while before you really get to see and understand change,” he told me, the first time I visited him in Penpont. “When you travel, you see differences, but not really change, so being in the same place is important for me—seeing kids being born and grow up, and people dying. I remember there was a pretty stern old lady who used to walk through the streets when I moved here, and when my oldest son was born I said to her, ‘Look, Jamie’s the first child to be born on the street for twenty-three years.’ And she said, ‘You see only births, and I see only deaths.’ ”
At this stage of life, Goldsworthy sees both. As he approaches his seventieth birthday, in July, he feels at the peak of his creative powers. In the past decade, he has realized several ambitious projects, foremost among them a work called “Hanging Stones.” Along a six-mile walk through a stunning valley near Rosedale, in North Yorkshire, Goldsworthy has rebuilt and reinterpreted ten derelict stone buildings, each of which a visitor opens with a key. (The public has access to the valley, but only a limited number of keys are distributed, through an arts foundation.) “Hanging Stones,” which was commissioned by David Ross, a wealthy electronics entrepreneur and a contemporary-art collector, is not a sculpture park, Goldsworthy insists; rather, it is a single work that is dependent on, and activated by, the presence of people in the landscape. Each building offers a new revelation. In one of them, iron-rich spring water flows through a row of apertures in a stone retaining wall, staining it over time with rust-red residue. In another, a conical interior formed from the interlocking boughs of trees culminates with an open oculus at the top, like an organically generated Pantheon. In a third building, an entire wall is made from improbably stacked rocks with spaces between them like lacework; through the gaps, a visitor can see the valley beyond. It’s a stained-glass window without the glass.
Last year, Goldsworthy brought the outside in, when the National Galleries of Scotland gave over the entire building of the Royal Scottish Academy, in Edinburgh, for a blockbuster exhibition marking his five decades as an artist. Titled “Fifty Years,” the show was not exactly a retrospective—much of the art was created for the space—but the materials and techniques were those which Goldsworthy has long worked with. Reams of barbed wire gathered from the fields around Penpont were fashioned into a mesh curtain whose ends wrapped around two columns at the top of the museum’s grand staircase; the result was both alluring and forbidding. Ten thousand cattails were used to create thin vertical rods, which were affixed to the perimeter of an octagonal skylight, creating a chapel with gently undulating walls. In another gallery, windfallen oak branches were fashioned into two steeply sloped, head-high banks, with a narrow passageway between the gnarled boughs which highlighted the space’s oak floorboards.
Goldsworthy’s œuvre typically isn’t displayed inside a museum, except in the form of photographs and videos, which he takes to create a record of the ephemeral works. His permanent structures are site-specific. Early in his career, he reluctantly agreed to relocate a cairn from Illinois to Pennsylvania, but his contracts now stipulate that his works cannot be moved after installation. (When a plutocrat sells a mansion, the Goldsworthy in the garden goes with it.) Goldsworthy told me that in Edinburgh he sought to remind visitors that the materials from which the Academy building was constructed—stone, wood, clay—are identical to what makes up the landscapes outside. “The idea that somehow nature begins at the edge of the city, or the door of a building, is nonsense,” he explained. “I hope that, by putting branches on the oak floor, people will think of the tree.”
The reaction to the Edinburgh show was rapturous, even from those in the art world who had previously dismissed Goldsworthy. (As the Sunday Times critic Waldemar Januszczak once put it, “The courtiers have him down as a peddler of easy coffee-table pleasures.”) The critic Louisa Buck, in an extended appreciation in The Art Newspaper, wrote, “For many years I felt it wasn’t cool to like Andy Goldsworthy,” adding that she now found his work to be “tougher, darker, more emotionally charged and widely referential than I had hitherto realised.” Buck is not alone in having underrated him; he has been largely overlooked by the Tate Modern, London’s most significant museum of contemporary art, which owns only five of his photographs. Aficionados of his work in the United Kingdom have to head north, to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield, which hosts several pieces, or to another outdoor venue, Jupiter Artland, outside Edinburgh. At the latter site, visitors can enter the “Coppice Room,” an outbuilding in whose interior Goldsworthy has wedged upright, tightly spaced tree trunks that induce claustrophobic dread the deeper one ventures, as in a dark retelling of a folktale.
Goldsworthy’s reputation has occasionally suffered from the irresistible imitability of some of his gestures. He ruefully blames himself for a proliferation of copycat stone cairns, and also for making too many of them himself earlier in his career. (In the two-thousands, he swore off building any more, and has mostly kept his resolve.) The accessibility of his work, and his use of natural materials, means that it is often adopted by elementary-school curricula, and he has learned to smile politely when parents tell him that their kid “made an Andy Goldsworthy” out of sticks, stones, and leaves. He drew a line a few years ago, however, when, while he was taking part in a group show at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, in Massachusetts, the institution made a similar gaffe. “They put a pile of stones outside with a sign saying ‘Make Your Own Andy Goldsworthy’—none of the other artists, only me,” he said. “I told them to take it down. It’s inappropriate.”
The sheer beauty of some of Goldsworthy’s work—sliced fronds of heron feathers arranged in stark geometries, or a boulder coated in blood-red poppy petals—has sometimes led him to be characterized as a visual version of an exultant nature poet. But Goldsworthy deplores the city dweller’s notion of the countryside as a picturesque escape. “For me, the landscape is not a place you go to for therapy and relaxation—it is to get challenged and have ideas, and to generate thoughts and feelings and emotions,” he told me. “It’s a very powerful thing to deal with.”
When Goldsworthy was a teen-ager, he had part-time jobs on dairy and cattle farms, and his art implicitly honors the demands of working the land. A field is “a battlefield,” he told me. “It’s been won through hard work and effort.” Some of Goldsworthy’s art has also required strenuous exertions. He has at times incorporated his own body, as with “Hedge Crawl,” completed in North Yorkshire in 2014, for which he made a video of himself clambering through a row of gnarly hawthorn trees—nature’s barbed wire. (He said of the experience, “It’s another world inside there,” adding, “I didn’t realize I was bleeding until I finished.”) Other experiments have been similarly challenging, such as putting foraged objects in his mouth and then spitting them out. “As soon as you put a petal or a flower in your mouth, the whole perception of it changes,” he explained, with undisguised glee. “It’s bitter. Is it going to kill me? You know? Until it goes in your mouth, it’s pretty. When it goes in your mouth, it’s ‘Oh, shit.’ I love that.”
In some ways, Goldsworthy’s rural life keeps him walled off from the world. He maintains a low profile online: he has no Instagram, and his website offers no contact information. Although he is represented by galleries in New York and San Francisco, he has not been signed with one in the U.K. for decades. “He has an anti-sales approach to sales,” the collector David Ross told me. His studio is managed by Tina Fiske, an art historian who runs gentle interference for him. She is also his partner. (They have a fifteen-year-old son—Goldsworthy’s fifth. He has four grownup children from his former marriage.)
Once you have tracked Goldsworthy down, however, he’s affable and chatty. Mirth bubbles under his words, even when he is discussing the prospect of inevitable physical decline. Goldsworthy, who has a shock of white hair and a scruff of beard, is dauntingly hardy; despite Scotland’s habitually inclement winter, he rarely gets bundled up in more than a Carhartt jacket, and I once saw him test whether a rubber boot had a hole in it by standing in a frigid stream until his foot got wet. But, while installing the Edinburgh show, he was gently reminded by the chief curator, Patrick Elliott, that this would probably be the last time he’d lug stones across a gallery, or bob up and down a ladder while plastering a wall with clay. The granary he bought four decades ago has lately been turned into a climate-controlled archive for his photographs and canvases. The facility is designed to outlive him. “I’m still fit, I can still work, but that’s not going to last,” Goldsworthy told me. “I don’t know how many more years I’ve got left of doing what I do.”
Not long after arriving in Penpont, Goldsworthy made a fortuitous acquaintance with Richard Scott, who is now the tenth Duke of Buccleuch and the twelfth Duke of Queensberry. The Duke, who is a year older than Goldsworthy, is one of the largest landowners in Scotland, with estates that extend across more than two hundred thousand acres, including the land around Penpont. The Duke grew up surrounded by art works collected by his ancestors, including a Madonna by Leonardo da Vinci and a prized portrait by Rembrandt, “Old Woman Reading.” In the mid-eighties, the Duke’s appreciation of contemporary art was limited, but his wife, Elizabeth Scott, was an arts journalist for the BBC. (She was also the daughter of a marquess.) When Elizabeth learned that an interesting young artist had taken up residence down the road, the Duke dropped in on Goldsworthy and asked if there was anything he needed. Goldsworthy replied that he would love to have a small piece of land on which to work. “The Duke said, ‘Have a look around and find somewhere, and we can see what we can do,’ ” Goldsworthy told me. “I found this area of rough woodland and a field where a tenant farmer used to feed his stock in winter, about twelve acres. Then the Duke went to the farmer, and the farmer being a farmer—well, if I’d wanted one field, I’d have had to ask for two fields, because he couldn’t just give me what I’d asked for. He gave me half the field.”
As part of the deal, Goldsworthy agreed to build a drystone wall to split the field in two. Rather than making a straight line, he inserted an S-bend, so that the farmer’s half of the field scooped for a stretch into Goldsworthy’s, and vice versa. The work, titled “Give and Take Wall” and completed in 1989, was an early instance of what has become a richly productive investigation into boundaries.
A professional stone craftsman whom Goldsworthy enlisted for “Give and Take Wall” kept undoing and redoing the artist’s own less skilled handiwork, and Goldsworthy appreciated the results. Ever since then, he has collaborated with artisans to execute his concepts. I recently joined Goldsworthy and a party of visitors to take a look at “Give and Take Wall,” which lies, unmarked, off a narrow road. After tramping through woodland for a few minutes, we found it. The fields were largely overgrown with trees, and the wall had a dense covering of moss.
“It’s quite an important work, this one—I should look after it better,” Goldsworthy said, mildly.
One of the people who had joined us for the excursion was James Fox, an art historian at Cambridge and the creative director of the Hugo Burge Foundation, which supports the arts and has given financial support to Goldsworthy. Fox was struck that such an important work by a major artist could be languishing in literal obscurity. “It’s like finding the ‘Demoiselles d’Avignon’ hidden in a barn,” he said.
As the give-and-take between Goldsworthy and the farmers of Penpont has deepened, the latter have become accustomed to the sight of the artist gathering wood or stones or fallen trees. He told me that they have almost always been welcoming to him, despite him being English and an artist—two categories that might invite skepticism. Goldsworthy credits the rural population’s open-mindedness to decades of outward migration from this part of Scotland; virtually every family he knows there has relatives in the United States or Australia. Many of his farmer neighbors, despite not being regular museumgoers, attended the opening of the Edinburgh exhibition. Similarly, Goldsworthy’s early dealings with the Duke of Buccleuch have developed into one of the most significant relationships of his creative life. When Goldsworthy and his family outgrew their home in Penpont, many years ago, he acquired the farm he now lives on from the Buccleuch estate, and, in part as payment, he made a sculpture for the Duke on the grounds of one of his properties, Drumlanrig Castle, a seventeenth-century pile not far from Penpont. The work is a stone arch that, rather than traversing a stream from one bank to another, stands in the water lengthwise, aligned with the rushing current, evoking a leaping salmon. The Duke has become an affectionate supporter of Goldsworthy’s. He told me, “As far as we are concerned, he has the run of the whole estate.”
Goldsworthy always knew that he’d be an artist. The son of a mathematics professor at the University of Leeds and a homemaker, he grew up playing in a woodland that edged a newly built suburban street where his family lived—at least until that woodland made way for another housing development. “My first reaction to that was one of anger, but then I realized, ‘Well, my house was once a wood,’ ” he recalled. He worked as a paperboy, and while delivering dailies he would think of the bog that one new house had replaced, or of the tree that had stood on the site of another. Despite his father’s example, Goldsworthy was not academically inclined. In his youth, all children in the British equivalent of sixth grade were supposed to take an exam to sort them into grammar or vocational schools; Goldsworthy wasn’t even given the test. “I was considered so stupid that they kind of gave up on me,” he recalled. “I was bright enough to understand that if I acted stupid enough they’d let me do art in every lesson.”
The jobs he took on farms, starting around the age of thirteen, taught him skills that have since served him well. “There is a hugely underestimated intelligence attached to manual labor,” he told me. “When you use your own energy, your own body, you have to be economical about how you do it. If you’re picking potatoes all day, or picking stones, you are working repetitively. You have to work with a rhythm and a fluidity, and you can’t be fighting it or forcing it. That’s really important for what I do as an artist—if you work with the right flow and rhythm, you give the work that rhythm.” From the start, he approached agricultural work with an artist’s eye. He once arranged stones that had been cleared from a farmer’s fields into a pile that “had soul.” The farmer urged him to place a flag on top. “Even he could see it was a beautiful pile,” Goldsworthy said.
After high school, Goldsworthy spent a year at an art college in Bradford, near Leeds, and then began a degree in fine art at Preston Polytechnic, in Lancaster. He found his best materials and ideas outdoors. He secured cheap accommodations not far from the vast expanse of Morecambe Bay, where he balanced rocks in gravity-defying sculptural forms and smeared his body with wet black sand along the shoreline. A 1976 photograph, now in Goldsworthy’s archive, shows him on his hands and knees, entirely coated in the stuff: bearded and shaggy, he looks like a Neanderthal in a museum diorama. He was excited by the innovations of such earthwork artists as Robert Smithson, whose “Spiral Jetty” had been erected on the edge of the Great Salt Lake, in Utah, and Christo and Jeanne-Claude, whose “Running Fence” extended a billowing nylon curtain for nearly twenty-five miles across the hills of Northern California. Goldsworthy also admired David Nash, a British land artist a decade his senior, who trained living ash trees into sculptural shapes. (Nash eventually became one of his champions.) Another formative figure was the German artist Joseph Beuys, who used his own body in performances and whose works about nature—one involved planting seven thousand oak trees in the city of Kassel—weren’t dependent on the availability of spacious landscapes.
Whereas North America contains vast wildernesses, there is barely an inch of the United Kingdom that hasn’t been cultivated or built on for centuries, and from the beginning Goldsworthy was concerned with the human presence within environments, including urban ones. While still in his teens, he created a work that consisted of a set of white rectangular frames made from wood, each the size of a person, which he placed on the streets of Bradford as if they were humans standing at a bus stop or waiting outside a telephone booth. Throughout the decades, he has created other city-based works. He has made giant snowballs embedded with rocks, crow feathers, and other natural materials, then allowed them to melt on the streets of London. For a series called “Rain Shadow,” he lay down on the ground at the onset of downpours, leaving short-lived images of his body outlined on wet pavement, disconcerting passersby. Works like these underscore a sometimes overlooked element of humor in Goldsworthy’s output, which, for all its earnestness, can be puckishly subversive. Among the large-scale works in the “Fifty Years” show was a project called “Red Flags,” which was originally displayed outside Rockefeller Center, in 2020. Fifty white flags were stained with reddish earth retrieved from each American state, with the intention of highlighting what unifies the fractious nation, not what divides it. “It is an anti-flag project in many ways,” Goldsworthy has explained.
His work from the eighties and nineties is often seen as anticipating what has only recently become a focus of many artists’ attention: the degradation of natural landscapes and the evident effects of climate change. Nora Lawrence, the executive director of the Storm King sculpture park, said of Goldsworthy, “He has been such a steward of natural space and also approaches it from an intellectual place, and knows so much about everything he is working with.” At Storm King, Goldsworthy’s wall wends between trees, at points buckling where the roots have grown. “The wall listens to the trees,” Lawrence said. Goldsworthy’s art, she noted, often speeds up the process of decay, which humans otherwise fail to register. At the same time, he resists being enlisted in narratives that place nature and humanity in opposition. “It’s the social nature of the British landscape that has fashioned me as an artist,” Goldsworthy told me. “Nature is people, and they are bound up in the land. All the fields, the woods, have the hand of a person in them.” He is not afraid to disturb the land, or to borrow from it. “I know that the things I take back will grow back and regenerate, and sometimes even benefit from the disturbance,” he said.
Goldsworthy’s work calls attention to the obscured industrial or agricultural histories of sites that have been depopulated, such as Rosedale, near the North Yorkshire valley where the ten buildings of “Hanging Stones” are situated. Rosedale was once known for its quarries and mines. “This is where iron came from for the Industrial Revolution, which produced the most amazing things, and the most horrific things,” Goldsworthy said. In acknowledgment of that complicated history, one of the buildings on the route is lined with barbed wire. “You come in there and you feel the conflict—it’s beautiful and scary,” he said. He gets infuriated when U.K. officials designate locations like Rosedale as protected “tranquil places,” particularly when such regulations slow down or thwart his artistic conceptions. “I guess these are areas where foxes can’t eat rabbits, and people can’t shout, and it shouldn’t rain,” he said, scornfully. “It’s so Orwellian to tell us we have to feel this in this particular place. You can feel anything there. There are times when it’s so beautiful and tranquil and calm, and others when it’s rough as hell, and brutal and difficult and cold. The people who live and work there, the farmers, know that more than anybody. To describe their life as a pastoral idyll is just insulting, and wrong.” Goldsworthy’s focus on human interactions within a landscape is so thoroughgoing that, when he is asked to work at a spot where humans have had a light touch, the commission can prove challenging. Currently, he noted, he is mulling a project in a remote part of New Mexico. “I love the desert, but I am finding it very, very difficult to come up with something that’s right for the place,” he admitted. Luckily, he added, “there is a fence that runs through it.”
It is the rare artist who enjoys planning his posthumous legacy rather than making the art to establish it. But, especially in the wake of the Edinburgh show, Goldsworthy has been obliged to give some practical thought to what he will leave behind. The first time I visited him, this past October, he took me to see a nineteenth-century building that he acquired a few years ago. (Next door, in a converted row of cottages, is Cample Line, a contemporary-art gallery directed by Tina Fiske.) He had been using it as an all-purpose storehouse, and there was still a great deal of unused space. Within a few weeks, he said, it would be receiving the art works from the “Fifty Years” show, which was closing. “When I finished installing the show, I thought, There is a lot of work that could find a home here in a different form—that could adapt and change,” he explained. Ultimately, he believed, the works could fill the building, forming a new whole.
The structure, which was unheated, with broken windows and whitewashed stone walls, had once been a grain merchant’s store. Volume measurements of barley and oats were still marked on a wall. With missing floorboards underfoot and dangling electrical wires overhead, the place appeared to need considerable refurbishing to make it hospitable to works of art—to my eye, it was certainly a barn unfit for the “Demoiselles d’Avignon.” But Goldsworthy was undaunted. “The beauty is the lineage of the material,” he said. “It all came from here. The cattails were cleaned in here. They were born here, taken up to Edinburgh, and are now coming back.” When I returned to Penpont, several months later, the top floor had been laid with new floorboards, and “Oak Passage” had been installed, adapted to the slightly different dimensions of the room. He was thinking of putting a clay wall he’d created for the show on a ceiling. Another raw space offered suitable dimensions for hanging the cattail chamber. Goldsworthy has no intention of opening the site to the public—the thought of applying for the necessary planning permissions leaves him aghast—but he’s aware that, at some point, the building might become a place for his work to be appreciated by people other than himself.
On the gloomy ground floor were piles of rocks resembling those which had been used in what, in my view, was the most striking work in the Edinburgh show. Goldsworthy had filled a gallery, wall to wall, with a sea of stones, ranging from pebbles to small boulders. When you entered the space, you had only a narrow strip of exposed floor to stand on—placing you on the boundary of the vast unreachable. The only light was that which dimly penetrated an opaque skylight overhead. The gallery felt sepulchral, and the work as weighty emotionally as it was physically; both times I visited, onlookers fell silent.
The installation was a provisional iteration of what is to be Goldsworthy’s most substantial work on his home terrain, a project called “Gravestones.” He first conceived of the piece while visiting the cemetery at Glencairn Parish Church, in Kirkland, where Judith Gregson, his former wife, is buried. (She died in a car accident in 2008, several years after their divorce.) Goldsworthy noticed that rough stones had been heaped in an out-of-the-way corner of the graveyard, and it dawned on him that they had been displaced from the ground to make way for coffins. “Once I realized what they were, that changed the stones completely,” Goldsworthy said. “They are treated as waste, and they accumulate in graveyards to the point that some people complain about them. I don’t know whether it’s that they don’t like the mess or that, subconsciously, they don’t like the reminder of what they represent. But, for me, they were unbelievably powerful—this connection to the exchange between the body and the earth, and the reminder of where we end up.” He envisaged a work consisting of four stone walls, each about four feet tall and eighty feet wide, surrounding a space filled with displaced stones from cemeteries throughout the county of Dumfries and Galloway.
“Gravestones” is to be erected on a hilltop not far from Drumlanrig Castle, and earlier this year I went on an outing to inspect the spot, joining a group who included Goldsworthy, the Duke of Buccleuch, and James Fox, the art historian. (The foundation that Fox works with is contributing two hundred thousand pounds toward the cost of the project.) At the base of the hill, we encountered mounds of stones that Goldsworthy had already recovered: a mixture of granite, whinstone, and glacial boulders, representing the geologies of different cemeteries. Goldsworthy had originally sought to use a site about half a mile away, but the head forester of the Buccleuch estate, Jim Colchester, had urged him to visit this spot. Goldsworthy said, “Jim told me, ‘There is this site that I have been saving,’ and of course I resisted the idea that anybody could choose a site better than me.”
We ascended, and despite steady rainfall we soon had stunning views of five valleys. Goldsworthy, who wore a black woollen hat pulled down over his eyebrows, swiftly navigated the steep, frequently muddy slope, then scaled a newly installed stile over a stone wall. “Jim brought me up here one day, and it was so foggy you couldn’t see a thing, but you could feel the place,” he said. “And the following day I raced up here and it was just Wow.” Colchester told me that he’d discovered the site years ago while fell running—jogging through the steep countryside. “Bar a few sheep, I don’t think many have stood there,” he said, adding, “Andy was talking about a piece of work being contemplative, somewhere to go and sit and think, and, to me, that’s where you’d do it.”
At the top, the proposed dimensions of the work had been marked out with posts and tape. Goldsworthy said that, though he didn’t much like the Victorian model of a hilltop monument—“too phallic”—the projected dimensions of “Gravestones” will mean that it reads as primarily horizontal. The walls, he explained, were to be red sandstone, from which many local buildings are constructed, including Drumlanrig Castle; as with traditional boundary walls at cemeteries, they would be finely finished, particularly in comparison with the mass of stones and boulders within. A sub-layer of quarried stone would be laid to prevent vegetation from pushing its way up through the pebbles and the boulders. Goldsworthy wanted the interior to remain stark and bare, though he supposed that the experience of seeing it under the open sky would be uplifting. The Duke, who was widowed two years ago, listened, visibly moved.
Fox suggested that future visitors might deposit a stone of their own on the pile, to commemorate a loved one. (Earlier, Goldsworthy had told me something similar: “Who knows? From here on, after a funeral, people may ask for a stone to put on your mantel shelf. It could change the whole way people respond to the material that comes out of a grave.”) “It’s about the cycle of life,” Fox said. “We emerge from the ground, and we return to it.” The project, like Rembrandt’s final self-portraits, had the thrilling gravity of work in which a mature artist brings his wealth of experience to bear on the unassimilable fact of mortality.
At the bottom of the hill, where there will eventually be a parking lot for visitors, Goldsworthy showed us a derelict building made from pinkish sandstone. Here, he hopes to install an accompanying work: a rammed-earth wall formed from reddish soil that has been dug up and discarded by gravediggers. Recessed within the wall will be a rectangular cavity measuring three feet by seven feet—the outline of a grave. The red earth, which Goldsworthy is already stockpiling in a farmer’s barn nearby, is rich in iron, the same substance that gives human blood its color. Dim light will make the cavity’s dimensions impossible to read. “It could look endless,” Goldsworthy said.
“Gravestones” is conceptually easy to grasp, but it is a logistical challenge to execute. In a sense, it is Goldsworthy’s largest project: the county of Dumfries and Galloway covers about two and a half thousand square miles. On the wall of his home studio, he has a map marked with more than a hundred cemeteries from which he and his assistant, Gregor Black—a recent art-school graduate whose father is the head gardener at Drumlanrig Castle—have been retrieving stones. Four hundred and fifty tons of rock will be needed to fill the space, and only about a quarter has been collected so far. Black has sometimes driven for miles to a particular cemetery only to find a funeral under way, obliging him to leave empty-handed. The remaining stones will be gathered in the course of the next two to three years, the harvest inevitably determined by the rate at which the county’s inhabitants die.
Officials at the county council, which is responsible for the administration of graveyards, have largely been helpful to Goldsworthy; he took me to a municipal yard where a pile of stones was being kept for him. Other rocks have been dumped at a site on the Buccleuch estate which is marked with a roughly painted wooden sign: “Materials for Artwork by Andy Goldsworthy Do Not Remove.” David West, who supervises fourteen graveyards in the county, told me that he’d never had any real exposure to art before seeing a presentation that Goldsworthy made to members of his department. He said that he admired the artist’s tenacity outdoors—“all the lying in fields, and letting the frost and the snow and the sun go all over you.” He went on, “That’s all new to me—I never, ever thought I would be interested in that. And then Andy came along.”
The amassing of burial stones may be unsettling to some. While the show was open in Edinburgh, Goldsworthy received a letter from a woman who was distressed to learn he had taken material from the cemeteries in which her sister and her mother were buried. “I rang her up, and she was really emotional. She’d said in the letter, ‘Who gave you the right?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’ve got permission, but that doesn’t give me the right. The right is what I do with them.’ ” A few weeks later, he received a conciliatory text, in which the woman said that she had since seen the show and now understood what he was trying to express. “She sent me a picture of her grandchild walking up the ‘Oak Passage,’ ” he said.
One morning while I was in Scotland, Goldsworthy proposed touring some of the graveyards from which stones were being collected. Our first stop was the cemetery of Penpont Church, a handsome Gothic Revival building with a spire that towers a hundred and twenty feet over the village. Goldsworthy had thought that we might see a grave being dug there that morning, but he’d been notified that the weather was too rainy for such work. Nevertheless, when we arrived, we found two gravediggers, craggy and weather-beaten, in high-visibility jackets, setting up with a wheelbarrow and a mechanical digger. The outline of a grave was already scored into the ground.
The pair looked wary as Goldsworthy approached and introduced himself as an artist, but, when he explained his project, looks of recognition passed across their faces: they’d heard about what he was up to, and they allowed us to linger while they worked. An open box made from plywood sheets had been constructed on one side of the grave, and excavated earth was deposited into it. At first, there was a layer of rich soil that revealed an earlier agricultural use for this stretch of cemetery, which lay at a distance from Victorian-era burial plots. Beneath this soil was a thin layer of red earth. At a depth of three or four feet, the ground grew rockier. As one of the men operated the mechanical digger, the other stood by with the wheelbarrow, into which his co-worker dumped an occasional load of earth mixed with stones, to go on a refuse heap in a corner of the cemetery.
Rain fell around us while the hole grew deeper, and when it reached seven feet Goldsworthy peered in. “It’s not unwelcoming,” he observed. He didn’t know whose burial it was intended for, and he did not want to know. Whereas “Gravestones” would commemorate undifferentiated humanity, this would be the resting place of an individual, privately loved and mourned.
From the Penpont graveyard, it is possible to see Goldsworthy’s farm, which is situated about half a mile away. On an earlier visit to the church, Goldsworthy told me that this is where he would like to be buried. He’s even located an ideal spot for his headstone: close to the far eastern edge of the cemetery, where a hawthorn grows by a stone boundary wall. It’s in the older section of the graveyard, so Goldsworthy doesn’t know if he can secure the plot. “I do have cemetery contacts now, though,” he told me. I asked him if he thought much about death, and his reply was both light and grave. “My own?” he said. “There’s always a bit of you thinking it’s never going to happen to you—even though it will.”
During the pandemic, when Goldsworthy’s projects beyond Penpont were disrupted, he often went to the cemetery to work. He would arrive before dawn and set up his camera, then stand in front of a grave, with his back facing east, so that as the sun rose he would see his shadow appear on the engraved headstone. “The sunrise changes all the time, so I had to hunt around and see where it’s landing,” he said. Several overcast days in a row could throw his calculations off, and he could spend an hour waiting for the first light, only to discover that his shadow was misaligned. He made around forty works, none of which he has yet shown to anyone. “They were a bit personal,” he said. “Maybe one day.”
While waiting for the sunrise, he said, he would read what was still legible of the headstone inscriptions. One sandstone marker, cracked in two places but restored, bore this dedication: “James Montgomery, son of Will Seaton and Mary McCall, who died on the 10th of September 1862, aged three months.” Below unfurled a terrible list memorializing the deaths of five more children: Jessie Agnes, Thomas Finlay, Margaret Dickson, John McCall, and a second James Montgomery. All had been between the ages of two and eleven, and all died within five weeks of one another, during the winter of 1875. “I’m standing here reading this, and I feel like weeping,” Goldsworthy said. “There is so much pain in that, isn’t there?” A little farther away was a memorial to a man named Robert McVinnie, who died at twenty-two, in 1909. “His End was Peace,” the headstone read. Below this was an inscription for McVinnie’s brother John, who was killed in action in France in August, 1918, at the age of twenty-three. Goldsworthy then read the words at the bottom of the headstone, which commemorated the young men’s father, Joseph McVinnie. He died in 1964, “in his one-hundred-and-third year.” Goldsworthy sighed. “Figure that one out,” he said.
On the way to the cemetery, Goldsworthy had told me that, at this stage of life, he wants to do only work that will stretch him as an artist. He is grateful that several large-scale permanent projects, including “Gravestones,” are likely to be completed soon. “I couldn’t have planned that, but I feel like they are being brought to a conclusion—and being made at a time in my life when I can realize them in a much better, stronger way than I would have done if they had actually happened earlier,” he explained.
I asked Goldsworthy if he felt that he could realize his work more effectively now because he has a stronger vision, or more resources. He answered, “I have a stronger everything.” Fifty years of making art had taught him how to work confidently with scale and mass and materials, allowing him to produce work that could last for centuries. “At the same time, there are also the ephemeral works,” he said. “They are at their strongest, and then they decay, they change, they collapse, and that can be beautiful, too.” I suggested that Goldsworthy himself was an ephemeral work. “We all are,” he replied. ♦
An earlier version of this article misstated the location of one of the galleries that represents Andy Goldsworthy.
