The Brooklyn Rail

The cover of the catalogue to Andy Goldsworthy’s grand exhibition in Edinburgh shows a still from a nearly ten-minute long film titled Red river rock. Dumfriesshire, Scotland, 19 August 2016. The artist’s arms and hands are visible at top right, rubbing a partly submerged river stone with earth containing iron ore. The flowing Scaur Water picks up the material and over the course of the film becomes saturated with billowing clouds of scarlet. Undertaking a Sisyphean task, Goldsworthy continues to apply red to the rock as the water washes his ministrations away. The key themes of this show are thus established: the authority of the artist’s hands, through which all his creations take shape; the importance of Scotland to his practice, in particular Dumfries and Galloway, where he has lived for four decades and where he has raised his five children; and the predominance of red in his oeuvre, a color whose signification stretches far and wide in mineralogy, biology, and as a hue communicating alert.

The emphasis on the hand institutionally dates back to an important catalogue of his sculpture titled Hand to Earth, from the Henry Moore Sculpture Centre (now the Henry Moore Institute) in Leeds (1990), remarkably the last time the artist had anything approaching a museum retrospective. More than any other practitioner’s, the entirety of Goldsworthy’s art is based on a haptic feel for materials, for their possibilities of manipulation in concert with their natural qualities and the context of the artwork’s setting. But what this show also reveals is his heart—his commitment to his idiosyncratic practice, yes, but also the appreciation this artist born in Cheshire, England, feels for his adoptive land of Scotland.

Full disclosure: Goldsworthy and I worked together for over five years on an exhibition of his work to be held at the Yale Center for British Art in 2024. Disappointingly, this was canceled in early COVID. The concept was a complete retrospective and generational positioning of the artist to cement him as one of the most important and broad-ranging sculptors of the past century, while also including works made by the artist on site and installations in the galleries of works from the permanent collection to his specifications. That is in no sense the premise of this exhibition by the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, which is largely comprised of spectacular new works made by the artist this year and installed on the first floor of William Henry Playfair’s Neo-Doric temple of art on The Mound, home of the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA). These are interspersed with smaller galleries containing recent projects. In the basement level are four modest rooms that present videos, photographs, and ephemera drawn from the artist’s collection assembled over the course of his fifty years of art practice.

The new and temporary works in the soaring first-floor galleries are the product of considerable planning and thought. The strongest pieces represent a kind of institutional critique, not of the National Galleries of Scotland, but rather of the idea of trying to contain the work of an artist whose whole career has been performed outside. The best comparison is to see Goldsworthy as the inverse of Bruce Nauman, who famously considers everything he does in the studio his artwork. Here, the artist’s theaters of operation are the fields, glens, and hills within walking distance of his home, where he makes what he terms “ephemeral works,” documented through video and photographs, and the various domestic and international settings where he has made what he calls “projects,” usually of a more permanent nature (with ephemeral works along the way).

At the entrance of the RSA, a strip of wool collected in fields rises along the center of the stair that takes you up to the premier étage. Wool Runner (2025) bears sparkles of color, remnants of the markings made by the farmers to distinguish their herds and maternal states of the ewes. It is like a welcome mat of whipped tutti frutti ice cream that entices you up the exposed sides of the staircase. But when you hit the landing, you are confronted by the artist’s sense of humor and a more grim purpose. In Fence (2025), the two central Doric columns of this elevated pronaos have been wrapped in rusted and degraded barbed wire that stretches across the space, barring entry and occluding vision of the cella beyond. Also gleaned from Dumfriesshire fields—and like wool, a frequent material in Goldsworthy’s ephemeral work—the barbed wire threatens both laceration and tetanus in equal measure, but the way it is wound around and between the two columns like a text-bearing Torah scroll, and the rigid horizontality of its installation, is very beautiful. At the left and right ends of this upper entry hall hang two large “Sheep Paintings” (2025): canvases that were laid in a field with a round mineral feed block placed in the middle. As the sheep move in to munch, whatever they track across the fibers—mud, shit, spittle—becomes the material of the painting. When the ruminants depart, the block is removed, and the “painting” is complete. Nature is Goldsworthy’s collaborator.

There are six other installations in the show. One is Work Gloves (2025), a strangely moving wall of polychromatic yet filthy hand apparel that fills a niche space beside a stair hall—easy to miss but necessary to view in order to understand the hard-won nature of the artist’s practice. In a side gallery, Skylight (2025) features an existing glazed ceiling oculus that was unable to be cleaned before the show opened, so naturally Goldsworthy calls attention to such institutional torpor and can’t-do-edness by raining interlocking reed mace (bullrushes) down from all its sides to the floor, creating an enterable space à la Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses,” and without any artificial lights. It is dim by design, but eloquent in its rising simplicity and the careful construction of the reeds, the color of which grows progressively lighter towards the top. The largest work is Oak Passage (2025), in a rectangular room that is very un-Dorically turned at a 90-degree angle to the long sides of the building. When you approach it, once you’ve navigated around the barbed wire, you see through the doorway a wall of over-head-high branches, looming like a fortified trench in the Great War. You must then walk around it to find a surprisingly linear V-shaped corridor running through two walls of branches from storm-fallen oaks, arrayed diagonally up and outwards on the centuries-old oak floor. These kinds of passages have been a productive staple in his work for the past decade, and literalize the experience of moving through nature (as reflected in his Hedge Walk video from 2014, displayed downstairs). At either end of this vast hall are two wall works: Ferns (2025), a meandering snake-like form composed entirely of fern fronds affixed to the wall with thorns, and at the other end Dock Drawing (2025), a brilliant sun-like design of radiating lines around an open circle made of dock stalks and affixed with thorns. You will have to pick either the Dionysian perspective or the Apollonian one for your social media shot. In a side room is Red Wall (2025), made of red earth clay allowed to dry and crack; along with the ferns piece it is the only installation reprised from earlier works, although of course both are site-specific to the RSA.

Finally, there is the greatest work, a magnum opus of sorts, a precursor to an eponymously titled project still in progress, Gravestones (2025). In an unlit side room is a single-level field of rocks of various sizes, all of which can fit in your hands. They fill nearly the whole space and come up to your feet, terminating in a smooth edge made by breaking some of them clean and aligning them parallel to the entry wall. The visitor has about four feet in which to stand to see the work. I immediately thought of Zoe Leonard’s Strange Fruit (1992–97) and Walter De Maria’s The Broken Kilometer (1979). This instinct proved correct in terms of the work’s dual memorial and measured meanings. The rocks have been harvested by Goldsworthy and his youngest son from 108 graveyards across Dumfries and Galloway—a few rooms away there is a map of each location, a gridded display of photos of the sites, and details of the project. The stones come from the material unearthed in digging graves. Eventually, 450 tons of stones will be assembled into an unenterable permanent work outdoors that will be enclosed by a dry stone wall: a wordless memorial to the departed, an appreciation of the nature that lies beneath us and to which we will eventually be committed, a salute to the laborers with shovels and backhoes that from time immemorial have enacted this human ritual, and, as ever, an eloquence that is only made possible due to its immense meaning and beauty. This is the power of Goldsworthy’s art: it illuminates the union between humanity and nature that has determined every picosecond of anthropoid life on this planet, with an innate aestheticism and elegant elucidation of laboriousness.