Andy Goldsworthy has dedicated his career to making art that brings humans into conversation with the natural world. Yet, Fifty Years, housed in the Royal Scottish Academy just off the bustle of Princes Street, is surrounded by none of the usual tranquility of his wild landscapes.
Within the exhibition, the visitor’s relationship to animals and the land is gradually constructed, beginning as you ascend the stairs alongside a wool runner still bearing the various differentiating colour markings used by farmers. A wall of barbed wire then blocks your path, forcing you to change course. Behind hangs a large canvas trampled in mud, a pure white circle at its centre. Together, the three reconstruct the agricultural process that is so integral to the farming industry in Goldsworthy’s home landscape of Dumfriesshire. Decontextualised by the cleanliness of the sculpture court, the raw textures introduce us to the rural world anew, alienating both the viewer and the art simultaneously.
For me, this complex relationship culminates in Hare Blood Snow (2004). After accidentally hitting a hare while driving, Goldsworthy took the animal home. He then filled the stomach with snow before hanging it over a piece of paper, repeating this process three times. Before attending the exhibition, I spoke to a friend who had recently visited and without hesitation she began telling me how much she disliked the piece. Her reaction, even to talking about it, was completely visceral. As someone who, like Goldsworthy, had grown up on and around farms where the use of animal bodies is a livelihood, I found this fascinating. By individualising the hare, the triptych conveys the manual exhaustion of the animal’s body in a way that most human processes involving dead animals never reveal to us. In the sterile gallery, the buckled paper is distinctly un-sanitised, removing the clean plastic packaging that coats anything agricultural in the city.
You would not be alone in thinking Fifty Years attempts to bring the landscapes of Goldsworthy’s art inside, but I suggest we should instead see the exhibition as much a conversation with the urban as with the rural. Unconfined to one medium, he brings the dirt, decay and blood usually so far removed from city life into the heart of its rhythm.
Image provided to The Student as press material.