Andy Goldsworthy

In the midst of getting ready for this Saturday's fair at the wonderful St Abbs Wool Festival we realised it was nearly the end of the Andy Goldsworthy 'Lost Landscapes' exhibition at Peter Potter Gallery, Haddington. Goldsworthy has been one of my favourite artists ever since I was introduced to his work by my high school Art teacher and his work never fails to entrance me, so I really didn't want to miss the chance to see images of his work on a large scale. Goldsworthy works with nature and the environment around him to create sculptures resonating with ephemeral beauty as it responds to natural forces of light and dark, time, the seasons, growth and decay.

Yesterday, we took a break and tootled up the A1 to Haddington and enjoyed our visit to the exhibition. I felt a bit greedy because I wanted to see more work by Goldsworthy and just as I was thinking that a browse through one of the books on display revealed the Midsummer Snowball works which I had never seen before!

From the Amazon blurb:

Just after midnight on 21 June 2000 - midsummer's day - Andy Goldsworthy supervised the unloading of 13 huge snowballs from refrigerated trucks parked by Smithfield Market in the City of London. Each snowball was several feet in diameter and weighed about a ton. Over the next few hours, they were carefully manoeuvred into predetermined sites on the streets of the City to be released from their plastic wrappings at dawn so that they were there to greet the workers in London's financial district as they streamed off buses and out of tube stations on their way to their offices. The snowballs were then left to melt - a process that, even in the warmth of summer, took anything up to six days. All this amazed, delighted and sometimes affronted the passers-by, and a rich element of "Midsummer Snowballs" is the public's responses: gazing, touching, smiling, laughing, or simply walking by and pretending to ignore the enormous mass of snow on the pavement. These reactions are covered in spontaneous photographs taken by a team of photographers who worked around the clock. The introduction by Judith Collins places the snowballs in the context not just of Goldsworthy's work but in that of earlier painters and sculptors. The story of the snowballs is told by Goldsworthy himself, and chronicled in the colour photographs.

The narrative of these giant snowballs revealing their various mysteries to passers by greatly intrigued me and this book is firmly on my really, really want list!



Trailer from the fantastic Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time