"Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured"
About this Quote
The subtext is about containment, and about the human impulse to make nature legible by putting it in a box. "Caged, captured" echoes museum logic - the vitrine, the specimen, the diorama - but Goldsworthy’s work undercuts that authority because the "cage" is made of time. Snow won’t stay. The capture is always a failed capture, a performance of control that dissolves on schedule. That’s where the tension lives: the artist builds a trap that can’t hold, and the viewer is forced to watch desire for permanence lose.
Contextually, Goldsworthy sits in a late-20th-century current that treats the landscape less as scenery than as collaborator and adversary. He’s not staging dominance over the outdoors; he’s staging a negotiation with entropy. Calling the objects "caged" flips the usual romance of handcrafted simplicity into something darker: tenderness can look like possession, and preservation can resemble a quiet kind of violence.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Goldsworthy, Andy. (2026, January 16). Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/some-of-the-snowballs-have-a-kind-of-animal-138325/
Chicago Style
Goldsworthy, Andy. "Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/some-of-the-snowballs-have-a-kind-of-animal-138325/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/some-of-the-snowballs-have-a-kind-of-animal-138325/. Accessed 9 Feb. 2026.




