"I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work"
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Andy Goldsworthy separates his practice from performance yet acknowledges that other people’s presence can be an essential material. Public context is not a stage for him; it is an environment whose rhythms, footsteps, glances, pauses, detours, become part of the sculpture’s life. The object is not the endpoint but a catalyst that awakens through circulation. As bodies move, sightlines shift, edges appear and disappear, and the work reveals itself in fragments and sequences, almost like frames in a film edited by the walker’s path.
This attitude clarifies his humility before both place and audience. He resists the artist-as-spectacle, foregrounding the work and its site rather than his own actions. Yet he accepts that completion happens outside the studio. A wall, line of stones, or woven leaves can be designed to register currents, wind, water, sun, but also the social currents of a path or plaza. People bring scale, rhythm, and time. Their shadows fall across a surface; their movement produces changing alignments; their wear patterns inscribe the sculpture with traces of use. The piece becomes a meeting point between natural processes and human flow.
Goldsworthy’s emphasis on public movement also implies responsibility to the site. By shaping attention rather than demanding it, he encourages a slower form of looking that heightens awareness of the terrain, seasons, and materials. The work is often quiet, even vulnerable, which invites care from those who encounter it. Participation can be as modest as a change of pace or a new route home, making spectators co-authors in the work’s unfolding.
Some sculptures, then, do not “work” as static objects. They are relational instruments tuned to their surroundings. Without the choreography of walking, gathering, dispersing, they remain latent. With it, they breathe, proving that a sculpture can be less a thing than a field of experience, activated by the simple, inexhaustible act of people moving through space.
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