time and again

Andy Goldsworthy. Roof (detail). Stacked slate.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 2005.
Photo by Thom Watson.

Last summer, I visited the ancient Irish sites of Knowth and Newgrange. There, the cluster of mounded “passage tombs” seemed almost like a natural part of the landscape, like they had grown there, or been put in place by once-upon-a-time geological forces. In fact they were built, stone upon stone, over 6000 years ago; built as shelters for the ashes and the souls of loved ones. As a place to belong to and a path to follow after death; both home and starting point for the journey, both resting place and threshold.  

More recently, I’ve been looking (again) at the work of Scottish artist, Andy Goldsworthy. His love for stone, his passion for the techniques and the labour that birthed the fences and the walls, the cairns and the structures of the ancients, is played out time and again in his very contemporary art; creating new poems in the ancient languages of stone.

Goldsworthy's 2005 work, Roof, is a cluster of corbelled vaults built out of stacked slate inside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Each is constructed in the same way as the mounds at Knowth or the tholos tombs of ancient Greece; as the trulli of the boot heel of Italy; as the arches at the Mayan site of Copan or at Angkor Thom in Cambodia; as the igloos of the Arctic. In Goldsworthy’s domes, however, a circular hole has been left at the top; an oculus, an opening, an eye. A way in or a way out. A passage.

Roof references home and shelter, but it also reprises a recurring theme in Goldsworthy’s work; that of the hole. He understands this work from the inside out, as a collection of voids: the absences that shape the presence, the emptiness that fills the spaces. As invisible and as formative as time.

“I used to say I will make no more holes,” he writes. “Now I know that I will always make them. I am drawn to them with the same urge I have to look over a cliff edge. It is possible that the last work I make will be a hole.”*

*Andy Goldsworthy, in Hand to Earth, page 24.

Andy Goldsworthy.  Roof. 2005

Newgrange, reconstructed passage tomb, County Meath, Ireland.
Constructed in approximately 4000 BCE.

Knowth. Ancient Irish passage tombs, County Meath, Ireland.
Approximately 4000 BCE.

Tomb at Knowth.

For more on Andy Goldsworthy, see this post. Or this one.

early morning calm

Andy Goldsworthy.
Early morning calm, knotweed stalks pushed into lake bottom,
made complete by their own reflections.
Derwent Water, Cumbria.  20 February and 8-9 March 1988.

At the centre is a hole.

It draws you in

to a liminal space;

to the silence of unknowing,

to the holding of the breath.

Andy Goldsworthy -- reflecting.

For more on Andy Goldsworthy, see this post. Or this one.

on Andy Goldsworthy and the making of holes...

Andy Goldsworthy.
Japanese maple leaves stitched together to make a floating chain,
the next day it became a hole supported underneath by a woven briar ring.
Ouchiyama-Mura, Japan.  21-22 November 1987.

Every hole

is an entry point,

a cave,

the crater of a volcano,

a passageway back

to the place of perpetual beginnings.

(Creation followed by destruction followed by creation again

is a geologic truth.)

2013-04-20

Andy Goldsworthy.
Damp sand, hollowed out, soft red stone grond into a powder around each rim.
Compton Bay, Isle of Wight. June 1987.

Andy Goldsworthy.
Seven Holes, 1991.
Greenpeace, London UK.
Clay sourced from ground outside the building, and building debris.

Andy Goldsworthy.
Runnymede Sculpture Farm, Woodside, California.
Clay from the site. Clay works fired on site in a temporary kiln, 6-18 June 1994.

Andy Goldsworthy.
Runnymede clay; Scottish, Janpanese, Californian bracken and ferns held with thorns to the wall.
San Jose Museum of Art, California. February 1995.

For more on Andy Goldsworthy, see this. Or this.