Andy Goldsworthy’s lasting ephemera

I once met a hiker who “collected” Goldsworthys, as he called them, by travelling everywhere the artist worked to find his delicate fern trails and colossal snowballs, before they vanished. It is the only way to do it. For the artist avoids dealers, rarely making (or leaving) anything permanent. An outdoor artist of the most rural ephemera, Goldsworthy cannot be bought.

But he can, it seems, be given a massive half-century retrospective in the neoclassical grandeur of Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy building. The artist has risen to the occasion exactly as you might expect, which is to invent new works in response to the environment. Visitors enter via a staircase laid with a carpet of sheep fleeces, stitched together with thorns, their branding marks a dizzying array of turquoise, orange and purple dabs against the white wool, their scent redolent of a damp winter’s tramp.

The immense central gallery appears at first to be filled with a tangled thicket of dark branches, waist-height and knotted like something growing upwards in a fairytale. But evidently you can walk through it, for others are strolling down the middle. Sure enough, the installation is divided by a central path, the branches on either side somehow woven together so that they lean away from the walker. It is impossible to see how this intricate basketry has been achieved, but it takes you straight to some remote, windblown track.

A gigantic writhing snake undulates across one end wall, or so it seems. In fact, what you see is entirely made of long stems of maidenhair fern, curved and fixed to each other – and the wall – with hawthorn spikes; a monumental drawing made without a single line or mark.

In the next gallery, thousands of rushes are suspended from the roof to create a kind of grass hut. But make your way inside and the bright stems are arranged so that they resemble organ pipes or baroque sunrays of shining metal; nature bent to high art.

Goldsworthy’s interventions in the past have been more minimal. He would find sheep’s wool caught on fences and drape the strands across a log, so it appeared zebra-striped, or arrange them in pale cascades down descending rocks. A borderline of violet foxglove heads would cross a glade. Twigs would be arranged in rushing masses across the forest floor.

These short-lived phenomena survive only in the photographs that fill a whole gallery of the RSA. Goldsworthy, born in 1956, has been out in the landscape since he worked on Yorkshire farms as a boy. An early black and white image shows him flinging hazel sticks in the air to make a wild drawing in the sky as a student in 1980. Later photographs record the many actions that link him to Britain’s Land Art movement thereafter, and to the work of Hamish Fulton and Richard Long.

Goldsworthy leans into a dyke, head disappearing entirely into the stones; he stretches a line of barbed wire right across a field. The association of body and nature is total; in one sequence, he seems to swim through a frosty hedge at dawn.

New works at either end of the entrance gallery take the form of pale discs surrounded by muddy marks; rising rustic suns. These so keenly resemble Long’s recent Mud Sun painting – at the top of the newly reopened Sainsbury Wing stairs in the National Gallery – as to make one wonder which artist was first (though Goldsworthy made such a sun long ago). But whereas Long worked with his bare hands, Goldsworthy’s paintings were made by animals. He nailed a couple of canvases to the ground, positioning a circular food block in the centre. Sheep fed on the blocks, trampling mud around them, the weather causing the dirt to be more or less liquid. Goldsworthy made inadvertent artists of the sheep.

Goldsworthy, who now employs colleagues, has produced more elaborate work over the decades. Between two high and mighty pillars, at the RSA, they have constructed a monumental warp and weft of old barbed wire, tarnished brown or dusty blue-grey. It twinkles forbiddingly here and there, and from it seeps a stench of rust and engineering oil irresistibly evocative of industrial farming.

This seems at least part of the work’s content: a moral and political inflection, to do with boundaries and ownership, that is not always present in Goldsworthy’s art. Some of what he makes is delicate, inventive, appealing to child and adult alike. It is made of what surrounds it: a wall of parched earth created from that earth, a cairn made of the stones lying around, wood neatly stacked like the logs in a porch. It is good to come across in situ, but does not reach any further.

Which is why the most potent work here also carries the strongest meaning. This is Gravestones, from 2025. A tide of broken stones fills the floor of one gallery, immediately invoking bare churned fields, Paul Nash’s nightmare seas, or the fallen headstones of an old cemetery. And it is precisely from such cemeteries that these stones are culled. The dead once displaced these stones – red granite, so evocative of Enlightenment Scotland – and now they are displaced all over again, gathered here as commemoration of the people of the past. Seen on a dark Edinburgh day, lit by nothing but the sepulchral gloom of the gallery, you witness the work – and the artist – at their best.

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, until 2 November

Photographs by Stuart Armitt/Andy Goldsworthy