Hand to Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976-1990
We were awed by Andy Goldsworthy's magical organic sculptures several years ago upon publication of hisA Collaboration with Nature(1990), and we're just as uplifted now by the experience of reading this retrospective volume and studying its startling photographs. Goldsworthy makes impossibly delicate structures out of leaves, sticks, stones, ice, and mud. Many of his creations are ephemeral, at the mercy of wind and rain, and he's even made spontaneous sculptures that can exist only in photographs, such as the patterns that occur when he tosses armfuls of leaves up against the sky or whomps the surface of a river with a large branch to create rainbows. He fashions both fragile, small-scale objects and immense earthworks, constructions as simple as a circle of twigs or as complex as huge cones of stacked slate. This collection of photographs, both by the artist and of him at work, essays, artist's statements, and interviews, including one by the British author John Fowles, extends our understanding of Goldsworthy's images, inspirations, and magical processes.Donna Seaman