We humans are time-beings as well as matter-and-energy things.

Some translations have “made everything beautiful in its time”. “For everything there is a season and a time for every matter under heaven … God has made everything suitable for its time” (From ). In respect to that last point, I find myself hearing in my head some of the words from Ecclesiastes 3. So, Andy Goldsworthy’s art, for me, holds these considerations together: delight in what is made respect for the way things work and also recognition of the timeliness of things. It seems to me that Andy’s process exemplifies what we should be about as humans in God’s world. And also by implication I am reminded of the mission of human beings to serve the land (that’s what the Hebrew says in Genesis 2:16) in ways that build on and respect God’s delight and purposes. What Andy’s work also does for me is enable me to re-echo God’s “It is good” as the photograph and arrangement photographed draw my attention to the comeliness of things. And yet I have constantly thought that to do so without consideration and deference to the cycles of nature is a serious unwisdom and dishonouring and disrespectful to the Creator.

I came to understand that human beings are capable of interrupting and re-fashioning these flows of matter and energy to our advantage and at greater scale than other creatures. I have felt there is a deeply implied ethic in the way that all of the natural world borrows from and pays back the ecosystem driven by the energy of the sun and gravity and the electro-magnetic forces at atomic scale. It seems like a sort of contemplative approach of listening and receptiveness which I find appeals to my spirituality.Īs I have reflected on these appreciative responses, I have realised also that some of my response is theological too: that my reception of the images is informed by my understanding of the world as God’s work.įrom my childhood I have had a sense of the awe and wonder of the non-human natural world and have sensed the god-ness of it even before I could think more fully about what ‘god-ness’ might involve and be (and I’m using deliberately an unusual and unspecified word here). I learnt that Andy’s process usually involved spending time in the context, reflecting on the environment and discovering what was there. For me, as a long-time environmentalist, this is deeply lovely -and that the works then re-enter natural processes and are recycled and re-taken by unhuman nature is in itself an aesthetic experience. The next level in speaks to me is that of the method of composition: that all the materials are provided by nature directly in situ. The first one being the sheer loveliness of colour and form and its harmoniousness with context field, fell or forest, water and sky. It spoke -and still speaks- to me at various levels.

I found it intriguing to learn that in many cases only the photograph he took lasted because having made the artwork and photographed it (itself an artwork, of course) he let nature take its course and wind, water and decay would erode and re-fragment his work. I do recall being stunned and amazed by the colours and shapes in a ‘natural’ landscape -produced by leaves, rocks, spittle, mud, water, thorns … All the more so as I discovered that Andy’s method was to use what he found in the location.

I can’t now recall when I first saw a photograph of Andy Goldsworthy’s art. Photo credit: by Viola-Ness – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,

Andy goldsworthy artworks