Stop and Look: Ice Star by Andy Goldsworthy
I’m deviating from the usual Stop and Look rules to bring you not a painting but a work by a living artist who is one of the supreme masters of a relatively new art form: nature sculpture.
Andy Goldsworthy is inspired by the physical characteristics of all forms and substances found in nature, and celebrates them by incorporating them in installations that are endlessly inventive. They may be as substantial as dry-stone walls in moorland settings, or as impermanent as puffs of smoke; all are recorded in photographs, since the objects themselves are dependent on the circumstances in which they came into existence: on the fall of light, on temperature, perhaps changing as the work is contemplated, on the season of the year, on the weather.
Unlike many forms of “nature art”, they are extraordinarily beautiful as aesthetic inventions, making use of colour, texture and scale and often with a clear sense of specific location. Goldsworthy presides over the intersection of scientific description and an exceptionally fine subjective feeling for natural objects of all kinds, whether coloured dust thrown up against a blue sky or leaves plastered in the crevices of a rock, or strung in lines on the current of a river. Often, his pieces take the form of a geometrical shape – a circle or a zig-zag, say – introduced into an unaltered natural surface, artificiality contrasted sometimes startlingly with its opposite.
As a rule, the objects speak for themselves, but I think we can permit ourselves to see this ice star as having special meaning around Christmas time. Goldsworthy has said: “I am drawn to wildness but do not have to be in a wilderness to find it. If much of my work appears to be made in such places it is because I find wildness in what is often considered commonplace. … most (if not all) that I need can be found within walking distance of my home…. Change is best experienced by staying in one place. I travel because I am invited and accept this just as I do ice when it’s freezing and leaves in Autumn.”
Whatever he chooses to work with, he invests with a beauty that we immediately see is inherent in the material itself, but which he brings out and enhances by a vital sympathy with its nature.
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