Edinburgh
Giant snowballs on City of London streets; delicate petal sculptures in the countryside; fern fronds pinned with thorns to the wall: “Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years” (on view through November 2, 2025) encompasses many aspects of the English artist’s practice, stretching back to his first forays as an art student in 1970s Lancashire. While this National Galleries of Scotland show features grainy films of early performative work, old exhibition catalogues, and notebooks filled with sketches for pieces that have long since decayed, its energy and momentum are very clearly in the here and now.
Beginning with a series of brand-new works, including an installation made of stones collected from graveyards (Gravestones, 2025) and a “partner” piece constructed from bullrush stalks (Skylight, 2025), we’re welcomed into the grand, neoclassical galleries of the Royal Scottish Academy by a wool carpet that runs up the middle of the stairs leading to the sculpture court. Wool Runner (2025) is made with cast-off wool gathered from grazing fields in Dumfriesshire, the rural Scottish county where Goldsworthy has lived since the 1980s. The wool is smudged with colored marks—yellow, blue, red, purple, orange—which mimic the markings used by farmers to keep track of their flocks, the different colors denoting ownership and other important information such as whether an ewe has twins.
At the top of the stairs, the warm invitation invoked by the rolled-out carpet is abruptly interrupted by Fence (2025)—multiple lengths of rusty barbed wire stretched between and around two columns. The resulting barrier strikes a discordant note, offering a spiky counterbalance to Goldsworthy’s usual focus on natural found materials. It also acts as a reminder that so much of what we think of as the “natural” world is, in fact, shaped and managed by human interactions. As Goldsworthy explains in the exhibition notes for Fence: “I rely on the goodwill and tolerance of others to be in many of the places where I work…There are times when I have been asked (and occasionally forced) to leave.”
Goldsworthy’s work has always been about our relationship with the land—or, in his words, how we are “bound to” it—rather than simply a celebration of nature. There’s a tough practicality about his approach, an unromantic ruggedness that recognizes the tensions and everyday realities of the context in which he works. Documentation for the large-scale commission Hanging Stones (2015–ongoing) reveals this in action, describing his quest to rebuild nine small, derelict buildings in the North York Moors National Park in order to create a single work linked by a six-mile walk. There are preparatory pencil drawings of each building’s interior with proposed sculptural interventions—a large hanging stone and what looks like a jagged slate wall, for example—research photos, and an extract from a letter to the national park authority. Mindful of not revealing “too much of what each house contains,” photographs of the completed interiors are not included.
Goldsworthy’s fascination with our place in the landscape can be traced back to when he was a teenage farmhand in rural Yorkshire. Its expression through his artistic practice began while he was studying fine art at Preston Polytechnic (now the University of Central Lancashire). Based at Morecambe Bay (a seaside town in Lancashire known for having the largest expanse of intertidal mudflats in the U.K.), in his first year, he “took a spade onto the beach and started making marks.” Black and white photographs of work from this period, including images of him naked and covered in Morecambe Bay mud, form part of one of the later rooms in the exhibition, documenting the period from 1975 to 1981.
That early interest in the land beneath our feet remains evident in Goldsworthy’s work, most recently in Red Wall (2025), which consists of clay-rich earth applied to the gallery wall, cracking as it dries. For Flags (2020), at New York’s Rockefeller Center, Goldsworthy flew 50 flags representing the U.S. states, individually dyed with the reddest, iron-rich earth he could get from each state, the intention being to highlight connection rather than division. In New York, the flags fluttered in the wind; here, they hang vertically in line across the center of the space, creating a subdued and subtle sense of dignified difference. In the midst of our contemporary moment, Goldsworthy’s art seems to offer a welcome dose of deep-time reality.
