JUNE 2009

SLATE, PINE AND FERN - The Landscape Art of Andy Goldsworthy

The FARNHAM DECORATIVE AND FINE ARTS SOCIETY met on 16 June 2009 at the Maltings for its Annual General Meeting and Lecture where the Chairman, Peter Duffy, and the Treasurer, Christopher Ellis, gave their reports.  Peter Duffy thanked the retiring Social Secretary, Carole Stone, and welcomed her replacement, Geraldine Williams to the Committee.  He reported on the illness of Jeanne Stow, the Visits Secretary, and said he would be relaying the best wishes of the Society to her.  The Officers of the Committee were duly elected.  Peter Duffy announced that Susan Filer was standing down as President after six years and thanked her for her support in this role and the new President was to be Elizabeth Bagnall.

He also announced that bookings for the visit to Corsham Court and Lacock Abbey on 23 September were now being taken. 

Dr David Cross, Author, Academic and Specialist in Artists of the Lake District, gave a talk on Slate, Pine and Fern – The Landscape Art of Andy Goldsworthy.  He described Andy Goldsworthy as a landscape art phenomenon, creating art, which reflected its surroundings.

Andy Goldsworthy creates temporary and permanent sculptures from naturally occurring objects, often in outdoor settings.  The temporary works he makes have a short-lived beauty, which adds to their poignancy.  His studio in Dumfriesshire houses photographic records of all his work, both temporary and permanent. 

David Cross showed a wonderful array of slides of the Andy Goldsworthy sculptures, from his first major sculpture exhibition at Grizedale, where he used logs, feathers, leaves and poppy petals, to his more permanent exhibitions of recent times, made from wood and stone.  He demonstrated the importance of light on his work, showing the contrasts of light at different times of the day.  He also showed examples of his work in cold weather when he used sheep wool, which he stretched over lichen rock and left outside until it became frozen, and when he used snow and ice to create snow fences. 

He was commissioned to create an art form from sheep folds around Cumbria  He restored sheep folds with circular walls, using slate and lattice as a gate; he placed boulders within the folds; he even used snowballs as temporary boulders with different ingredients mixed within them, which created a variety of effects as they melted.  These sheep folds were a memorial to the struggle of the sheep farmers to raise their sheep in the hard conditions of this area, and more specifically the hardships suffered recently from the outbreak of foot and mouth disease.

His more recent and numerous endeavours have been fir-cone shaped cairns usually created in stone.  These have become progressively more sophisticated, with his use of his skills in mathematics acquired from his father to make the shapes. 

Andy Goldsworthy has become world renowned for his naturalistic sculptures and is especially admired by the Americans, but is still best known for his work centred on the Lake District.

Copy by Maralyn Sharpe
Photo by Graham Parlett