This celebration of 50 years of internationally acclaimed sculptor and environmentalist Andy Goldsworthy features more than 200 pieces of unique artwork. But the experience is hamstrung by its venue and a clash of environments.
Filling both floors of the National Gallery’s Royal Scottish Academy building, the custom exhibition is his largest indoor show ever, and a “work in its own right”, according to the Dumfriesshire-based artist.
Fifty flags, dyed with the darkest earth of each of the U.S. states, greet you early in the exhibition. Beautiful in its simplicity, the row of hanging canvas was originally displayed outside the Rockefeller Center in New York and succeeds in its attempt to symbolise connection, both to each other and to the land. Huge canvases painted outdoors by sheep’s cloven hooves conjure vivid images of the fields in which they were created.
A wall of barbed wire on entry makes clear the exhibition’s aim: to comment on the interrelationship between humans and the working land. But as I progressed through the other exhibits of natural art brought indoors, I couldn’t help but wonder if that barbed wire had also managed to trap, inside, pieces that would be better shown in their original environments.
The venue plays a large part. For all the beauty of the building, Goldsworthy’s work is, at heart, about our natural world. It was difficult to reconcile that with a dim, windowless Georgian gallery with grubby skylights. A room of 10,000 floating Scottish reeds, aspiring to a halo of light, felt muted — not due to concept, but due to poor lighting. Many of the spaces felt pressured and crowded. A host of staff protecting the unbarriered work made it difficult to let the mind breathe.
Seeing another of Goldsworthy’s permanent installations last year at Edinburgh’s Jupiter Artland — a sculpture park on the outskirts of the city — alone in the half-light of late afternoon, hearing birds, wind, and nothing more, was profound.
Here, however, there was no connection to place. It rarely felt raw, aside from one piece made from the blood of a hare he had accidentally hit while driving, and whose stomach he utilised as a paint vessel. Was it a comment on humanity’s impact on the natural world? For me, the result did not celebrate anything. The lack of respect left a sour taste in my mouth.
Downstairs, photographs of previous outdoor installations remind us how powerful and grand in scale his work can be.
A field of displaced gravestones in one room provides evidence of an ongoing, large-scale project to show one impact of our bodies on the earth. Once the final result is installed outdoors in Dumfriesshire, I would like to visit. But indoors, it feels contrived. We can only hope it inspires others to go outside and glimpse nature itself.
Goldsworthy’s work is truly stunning in the right environment. But if this is the most ambitious indoor exhibition of his work ever attempted, perhaps indoors is not the right place.
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is running until 25 August at Royal Scottish Academy at National Galleries Scotland.
Buy tickets here.
Image courtesy of the artist, provided to The Student as press material.