Andy Goldsworthy creates sculptures in the landscape, using nature as the raw material and subject of his work. A National Touring exhibition from the Hayward Gallery brings together a series of 15 colour photographs of these works, made between 1977 and 1979. Drawn from the Arts Council Collection, the exhibition comes to Lochmaddy in June as part of an extensive UK tour.
Goldsworthy uses materials, from stones and twigs to snow and icicles, to create works that offer the viewer a heightened experience of the energy and patterning of the natural world. Photographs often provide the only lasting evidence of the artist’s reworking of nature, preserving “the optimum moment, the moment when I had not just made the piece, but understood the piece”. One of the photographs in the exhibition is of a black soil-covered snowball sitting in stark contrast against the white of the surrounding snow. Another image shows a seemingly haphazard arrangement of grass stalks on the ground.
Goldsworthy has been working in photography since the mid-1970s, but winning a North West Arts Major Award in 1979 enabled him to have photographs professionally printed up for exhibition for the first time. The result was this series of 15 colour photographs, selected and purchased for the Arts Council Collection for inclusion in the group exhibition of sculpture and photographs, Nature as Material, which toured the UK in 1980.