![]() Yet as we see in Leaning into the Wind, Goldsworthy is frequently joined by his daughter Holly, who, after finishing art school, began assisting her father on some of his projects. “When I was growing up, the last thing you would do is work with your parents. “I had always wondered, living in a rural place, how come a farmer’s children so often become farmers?” Goldsworthy ponders. “I’ll never look at a hedge the same way again,” he notes. At times, his practice resembles endurance performance, but these actions aren’t intended to test the limits of his body-they’re experiments meant to answer questions about the physical world. He works outside in all kinds of weather, in torpid jungles and in icy English winters. Goldsworthy is unconcerned about personal comfort. “I’ve walked in thorn hedges, and have come out quiet bloodied at the other end, but I don’t really notice when I’m in there,” he says. The film features several of these transits, some in which he crawls through leafy shrubbery (“I just got colder and colder until I was hypothermic when I came out the other end”), and another through naked branches laced with thorns. “It is appallingly painful,” Goldsworthy says of his experiments in what he describes alternately as climbing or swimming through hedges. Lately, the artist has experimented with traveling via hedge, as if the foliage is just another kind of staircase or garden path. Sadly, the Andy Goldsworthy Institute of Creative Exploration will never exist, but here’s a consolation prize: five lessons Goldsworthy’s work can teach us about how to live a creative life. “Also, I’m not a great teacher,” he adds. What he does isn’t intended to be didactic, he explains, and instructing someone to imitate the work would run counter to its very purpose. We’re on the phone, but I suspect he’s cringing a little. “I think that would be really strange,” Goldsworthy tells me. When I speak with Goldsworthy, I ask him to imagine a hypothetical school based on his work-a place for others to follow his lead. ![]() Can exercises inspired by his practice teach us how to best approach our own creative work? Like transcendental meditation or the board game Go, the rules of Goldsworthy’s practice seem tantalizingly simple-something that anyone can attempt, without ever really mastering. It made me ponder what I’d learned playing Goldsworthy for a day. Riedelsheimer has just released a follow-up documentary on Goldsworthy, Leaning into the Wind, and watching it reminded me of that long-ago afternoon in the park. There are also more durable, public installations of wood or stone, such as Five Men, Seventeen Days, Fifteen Boulders, One Wall (2010), a 2,000-foot-long fieldstone wall that winds like a ribbon between the trees, disappears into a pond, and emerges on the opposite bank. Goldsworthy creates ephemeral works from unstable materials like light, water, and ice that mainly survive only as photographs. ![]() In it, we saw Goldsworthy, a lone figure surrounded by nature, creating sculptures in his peculiar and dogged way: carefully balanced stones, sticks held together seemingly by magic, and leaves floating in a unwinding spiral formation as they followed the current of a stream. We had just watched Thomas Riedelsheimer’s 2001 documentary Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time. This wasn’t a case of art student whimsy we were dutifully completing a class assignment. Tourists and dog-walkers gave us curious looks. The sun was warm and the park smelled pleasantly of cut grass and horse manure. Around me, my classmates were occupied with building small sculptures out of twigs, stones, and grass-resembling the work of either dedicated children or very coordinated squirrels. Then I wove them through the links of the fence, creating a gradient that turned from bright green to golden yellow. On an autumn afternoon during my first year of design school, I sat near a low chain-link fence in Central Park, sorting leaves by color.
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