Creativity Quote by Andy Goldsworthy

Repetition is supposed to dull the senses; Goldsworthy insists it can sharpen them. The first sentence reads like a confession from someone who knows how easily we let familiarity flatten a landscape into mere route. “The same streets” are an accusation against autopilot: you can pass through a place for years and still not meet it. Then the pivot: a “place…hidden to me.” Hidden not by geography, but by attention. In Goldsworthy’s world, discovery isn’t about exotic travel; it’s about a reset of perception, the kind his ephemeral, site-specific works demand.

The second sentence gets stranger, and more revealing. “Sites” carries the double meaning of location and sight, as if he’s learned to see the street as a material. The phrase “connections between place and snowball” is classic Goldsworthy: disarmingly plain, almost childlike, and quietly radical. A snowball is temporary, portable, and destined to change state. Pairing it with “place” sets up a tension between the fixed and the fleeting. He’s suggesting that his medium isn’t just snow, stone, or leaves, but relationships: temperature, surface, timing, thaw.

The subtext is artistic self-critique. “Could have made better use” implies missed chances, a sense that the environment offered more collaboration than he took. It’s also a manifesto against studio thinking: art happens when you notice the hidden affordances of the everyday, before they melt.