Andy Goldsworthy Quotes

I did photography, painting, and drawing, but I prefer sculpture. I like it because it's very physical.

Photographs are two-dimensional. I work in four dimensions.

One thing that changed when I moved upstate was that I became interested in different materials. I started making the stone benches because I was seeing rocks.

Sculpture occupies real space like we do... you walk around it and relate to it almost as another person or another object.

Landscape affects you.

Nature knows that people are a tide that swells and in time will ebb, and all their works dissolve ... As for us: We must uncenter our minds from ourselves. We must unhumanize our views a little and become confident as the rock and ocean that we are made from.

If you are the lantern, I am the flame; If you are the lake, then I am the rain; If you are the desert, I am the sea; If you are the blossom, I am the bee; If you are the fruit, then I am the core; If you are the rock, then I am the ore; If you are the ballad, I am the word; If you are the sheath, then I am the sword.

Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything--cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks--press inexorably on and on.

They say to just write about what's happening in your backyard because that's where you find the most creativity. It's in the DNA of the show. There's no question.

Show me two villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of October, the other a merely trivial and treelesswaste, or with only a single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the most desperate drinkers.

Sculpture is made by taking away, while painting is made by adding.

Its about cherishing the woodland at the bottom of your garden or the stream that runs through it. It affects every aspect of life.

We inter-breath with the rain forests, we drink from the oceans. They are part of our own body.

Many people think that when we practice agriculture, nature is helping us in our efforts to grow food. This is an exclusively human-centered viewpoint... we should instead, realize that we are receiving that which nature decides to give us. A farmer does not grow something in the sense that he or she creates it. That human is only a small part of the whole process by which nature expresses its being. The farmer has very little influence over that process... other than being there and doing his or her small part.

We have no outside point of view. We are nature too.

I don’t know, I don’t feel right unless I’ve got the sea and mountains nearby. People are mostly a product of where they were born and raised. How you think and feel’s always linked to the lay of the land, the temperature. The prevailing winds, even.

In dance, in composition, in sculpture, the experience is the same: we are more the conduit than the creator of what we express.

If there is some good in me, it is because I was born in the subtle atmosphere of your country of Arezzo. Along with the milk of my nurse I received the knack of handling chisel and hammer, with which I make my figures.

There is the potential for much more spontaneity with prints than there is with the sculpture, which tends to be very slow, accretive kind of process-labor intensive.

Fortunately, like most children, I had learned what is most valuable, most indispensable for life before school years began, taught by apple trees, by rain and sun, river and woods.

Evolution does not isolate us from the rest of the Kosmos, it unites us with the rest of the Kosmos: the same currents that produced birds from dust and poetry from rocks produce egos from ids and sages from egos.

If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.

Atoms are a relationship of energy. You are a relationship of energy interacting with another person who is another complex relationship of energy. We all exchange more than words with each other. . . We are made of the same substance as rocks and stars. .. We are an exotic cocktail living on this planet. .. We live in this universe which is a self-transcending reality

I just look at it as a real group activity when you are making movies. There are so many different artists doing so many different things, and they are all interconnected. So I like to see what everybody else is going to bring to the table before I make up my mind too much about anything.

It can no longer be maintained that the properties of any one thing in the universe are independent of the existence or non-existence of everything else. It is, at last, no longer sensible to speak of a universe with only one thing in it.