Picking potatoes
You may have glimpsed it from the poplar-lined drive, or perhaps from the western edge of the museum. Stone Sea Passage may appear to you, at first glance, as a kind of sea wall, jetty or breakwater—a long tumble of sandstone chunks advancing into the water. Only as you move closer will you discover its concealed secret: a pathway open to the tide. ‘It’s a sea gate, not a wall’, says the English sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, who cites the sea as one of his biggest influences. ‘I’m asking the sea to come in.’ An invitation he extends to people too: he intends that you enter the passage, from the riverbank down into the water and silt, and walk its length. (Gumboots optional. Although when Goldsworthy and his team were here, finishing construction of the work, a kayaker tried paddling into the passage from the bay—Andy was thrilled.) This is how the sculpture ‘comes alive’, Goldsworthy says, your human presence altering perceptions of its scale, form and light. ‘My work is about change.’ As he has said:
I’m not an artist born full of things I want to express. I’m empty, hungry, wanting to know more. That’s my true self; and my art is a way of learning, in which instincts guide best. It is also very physical—I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. It is a collaboration, a meeting-point between my own and earth’s nature.1
Although he prefers not to travel, he spent productive periods here in Tasmania finalising his concept for Mona, immersing himself in the landscape. ‘It’s tough, pretty brutal,’ he told Mona curator Jarrod Rawlins. ‘Just magical. Very powerful, and very disturbing.’ He’s alive to his condition as outsider, a stranger amidst the bush and rock; and sensitive to the place’s history and natural rhythms, which he seeks to come to grips with via hands-on labour, to divine something true about ‘the soul of the place’. He speaks of his love of quarries, and the hurt caused by carving up the rock—a pain he seems to register in his body as much as in the earth itself, and as a kind of violence to the psyche. He says it’s important that he and his team cut the stone themselves rather than ordering material from elsewhere, otherwise ‘it’s just the carcass, not the life itself’.
He went to a retreating forest at dawn, out near the quarry where he cut the rock for Stone Sea Passage, the ground shorn of vegetation by sheep, and filmed the rising sun’s shadow of his body against a dead tree (he did the same at sundown). As cold weather set in at the quarry, he laid his body down on the cracked earth to create ‘rain shadows’, documenting his dry outline disappearing into wet ground. Earlier, visiting Marion Bay, he filmed himself tossing slippery armfuls of kelp into the sky. Seen in isolation, these transient actions seem esoteric or mad, even pretentiously indulgent. But then I watched Thomas Riedelsheimer’s documentary about Goldsworthy, and I realised he would be doing these things—painting his hands red with wet poppy petals before washing away his work in a river; later in the film he clambers through a hedge, to perplexed looks from passers-by—whether or not anyone paid him attention, whether or not the category of art set in as he moved through the world.2
Images:
Colebrook Quarry Rain Shadow, Tasmania, 28 February 2024, Andy Goldsworthy. Stills taken from video
Copyright of the artist
But Goldsworthy has his critics. His art has been dismissed by some as unfashionable ‘back-to-the-land schmalz’; popular to the point of getting ‘a bit too likable for its own good’; and as ‘pastoral fictions … about as radical as The Body Shop’.3 Even Mona’s owner David Walsh has had a go, calling Goldsworthy ‘the world’s most expensive gardener’ (ironic, I think, when read in context of David’s happy investment in Stone Sea Passage). But who said art needs to be radical? Is that the metric by which art succeeds or fails? Against what criteria is radicalness measured, against whose judgement?
I keep thinking of Goldsworthy’s rain shadows at the quarry—the work of an obsessive, but ultimately fleeting creations. I’m with curator Sarah Wallace, who said to me she senses a kind of selflessness in Goldsworthy surrendering Stone Sea Passage to the environment, to nature’s erosive whims of wind and water—to impermanence and eventual decay (originally he considered hard dolerite before settling on workable sandstone, which weathers faster over time but will still outlast you and me). Discussing Goldsworthy, Brian Boyd points out that much art can be understood as an attempt to control the uncertainty of life and death—from statues of gods believed to be immortal, to the pyramids of Egypt built to safeguard an afterlife for those buried within.4 But I don’t get the feeling that Goldsworthy desires control, or fears uncertain outcomes. Okay, yes, he’s imposing order and pattern on natural materials here, of course he is; carefully manipulating rock to his will in order to externalise his vision. But in Goldsworthy that impulse feels far from any kind of arrogant mastery of nature. As he put it to Jarrod, Stone Sea Passage is about our human passage through nature. Quite literally, in one sense, as a corridor for walking from land to water. And at the same time, in another sense, seeming to emblematise our passage through life, a brief passing through. Stone falls apart, disintegrates, becomes dust; and so do we.
This passage is the third of its kind that Goldsworthy has made, following Passage, 2015, cut through a forest floor in New Hampshire, USA; and Hedge Walk, 2023, a hawthorn-arched ditch dug between fields in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It’s a long journey from those to Stone Sea Passage, a decade in the making at Mona, which is itself approximately 18,000 km from Goldsworthy’s home in Dumfriesshire, Scotland. But in his mind, they’re all connected, part of a network of pathways unfurling around the planet. ‘I’ll be walking it for the rest of my life,’ he told Jarrod. It occurs to me now that Goldsworthy’s project may share some affinity with Mona’s underground tunnels, which David sees as forcing people to take part in a kind of ceremony. Think of circling the Kaaba in Mecca, he says, or visiting the Stations of the Cross, or the ancient Nazca Lines in Peru, which seem to be made simply for walking along. But, as David says, Mona’s walking rituals seek no meaning—even though you may come to feel some purpose as you navigate the museum tunnels, or wade through Goldsworthy’s sea gate.
This is starting to sound a bit grand. Goldsworthy brings me back down to earth: ‘A lot of my work is like picking potatoes’, he says, ‘You have to get into the rhythm of it.’ In viewing his work I feel the rhythms he found. Stone Sea Passage potatoes I’ve picked thus far, thanks Andy: noticing lines redrawn daily by the tide’s ebb and flow; the long, sloped silhouette echoing something of the distant mountain; cormorants, pied oystercatchers and other shorebirds huddling along the sandstone on a still day, the dark water smooth as oil; and as I come and go from my office, the sight of the structure’s spine marks out my time at Mona, now part of the rhythm of my life.
1. Interview with John Fowles, Hand to Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976–1990, W.S. Maney & Son, Leeds, 1991, p. 161.
2. Thomas Riedelsheimer, Leaning into the Wind, 2017.
3. See Peter Schjeldahl, The Art of Dying: Writings, 2019–2022, Abrams, New York, 2024, p. 66; Andrew Motion, ‘The Pencil of Nature’, The New York Review of Books, 8 February 2018, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/andy-goldsworthy-pencil-nature/ (https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/08/andy-goldsworthy-pencil-nature/); and Jonathan Jones, ‘Something nasty in the woods’, The Guardian, 4 March 2000, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/04/books.guardianreview5 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2000/mar/04/books.guardianreview5). It’s worth noting that Schjeldahl later revised his opinion, calling Goldsworthy’s art ‘rigorously intelligent as well as ecstatic … unfolding at the pace of a waking dream’: ‘The gratuitous labour-intensiveness generates a paean to the first human being who placed one stone atop another, and to every other since then and in time to come’, p. 66.
4. Brian Boyd, On the Origin of Art, exhibition commentary, Mona, Hobart, 2016–17. Professor Boyd, as guest curator, included in his section of the exhibition two installations made and documented by Andy Goldsworthy in Japan in 1987.
Images:
Stone Sea Passage, 2024, Andy Goldsworthy
Sandstone