The foreman, Gordon Wilson, is on the phone to Goldsworthy, clarifying whether the copestones of the enclosure will be done in the Yorkshire style, rough and ready, or the Nottinghamshire, curved another group on a different hill is making a complex sheep pen. Five men are out in a copse making a circular dry-stone structure that will obstruct a right of way and offer no entry or exit a stubborn comment on the Enclosure Act of 1801, among other things. This morning I come across several of them, working in small groups on the various ingenious constructions that Goldsworthy has set in motion. In the time since, he has collected a team of craftsmen and labourers who follow him around the globe, humping wood and carving stone. He was a guest artist at this sculpture park way back in 1983, when he was still asking himself whether there might be a career at all in making piles of stones off the beach look like Brancusis or in taking vast Scottish snowballs down to London and observing them melt. He grew up not too far from here, on the Harrogate side of Leeds, in a house edging the green belt. A return to the green, green grass of home feels overdue. He has made unlikely cairns in Des Moines, a monumental Holocaust memorial in New York (for which he planted oak trees in giant boulders). ![]() Lately, the British countryside's most engaging propagandist has been pursuing his vision all across the world. Goldsworthy is 50 and, as these questions suggest, back in his element. ![]() ![]() Goldsworthy creates moments of wonder out of local rocks and earth and trees, and this wandering prompts several questions, which I jot down in my notebook: are all farm animals abstract expressionists? Is one dry-stone waller's work distinguishable from another's? Just how do you suspend these three oak trees in mid-air below ground in the middle of a field? And, is sheep shit more user-friendly (for smearing on gallery windows) than cow shit? Before I meet Andy Goldsworthy, I have a wander round the retrospective of his work being constructed at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield.
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