Not for sale: National treasure – or National Gallery!
Nick Jones encounters a burning desire from a visitor to the Andy Goldsworthy/50 Years exhibition at the National Gallery Scotland to buy it lock stock and barrel. Not on, he says.
Andy Goldsworthy, Fence, 2025. ©Stuart Armitt, 2025.
NORTHUMBERLAND, Bamburgh's Croquet Lawn, below the Castle, last year. An oriental gentleman stops me. Do I think he could buy the castle? I express doubt. Pity, he says, it's just what he's looking for. Really, he'd like to rebuild it back home.
We met again recently in First Class, en route to Kings Cross. He's with his wife. They've been to see Andy Goldsworthy/Fifty Years, a National Galleries of Scotland exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy. They loved it. Now, they want it. All of it, including William Playfair's Doric building. It makes sense. The building is integral to Goldsworthy's creation.
Andy Goldsworthy, Oak Passage and Fern Drawing, 2025. ©Stuart Armitt, 2025.
She asks me if I've seen the Terracotta Army. Yes, British Museum 2008, a great hit, drawing record crowds. As did Goldsworthy, Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2007.
They think big, these oriental plutocrats. Their vision is simple: the world's greatest collection of contemporary artwork. Did I know/have any contacts, so that they could start negotiating? They'd be happy to pay for a new building. Of course they would! Needing thinking time, I head for the bar. They're pulling my leg, surely? They look inscrutable.
Sheepfolds Casterton Drove Stones. Photo: Steve Chettle ARTS UK
The Land Art movement had its roots in radical protest against capitalism, including ownership of land, property, or artworks. Much is intentionally temporary, and ephemeral. So it would be ironic for an art-collector to possess AG/50 lock, stock and barrel. But then, why not?
Better, perhaps, than paying $6M for a banana, like one crypto-billionaire. As for moving the building, again, why not? In 1996 Goldsworthy, commissioned by Cirque de Soleil in Montreal, discovered a grand house there, built from Dumfriesshire red sandstone from near his home, shipped across the Atlantic as ballast.
He wrote "Stone and people making the same journey is for me a powerful expression of movement and of the great upheavals and displacements that have occurred to both." He shipped more stone and built an arch, a recurrent theme. As a young man, working on a farm in Lancashire, he got a taste for being outside, working with nature, observing and being part of the rhythm of the seasons, the cycle of life and death, change and impermanence.
The Highland Clearances drove people off the land in favour of sheep, which were more profitable. Crofters headed for cities, or far-flung corners of Empire. Approaching AG/50, fleeces climb the stairs. Inside, a wall of rusty barbed wire, a stark reminder of borders, barriers, and human obsession with possession and territory.
Nature hasn't taken over here, but its traces are everywhere. An aisle flanked by branches, a wall of red clay, stones displaced to make way for graves. No deep holes into the ground though. If there were, they'd reveal remnants from some two million cartloads of earth and detritus from which The Mound was made, by-products from constructing the New Town between 1781 and 1830.
Flow, movement, change, and moments in time are essential elements in so many Goldsworthys, be it of leaves in a river, incoming tide, rain making a shadow of his body lying on the grass, or snow puffing into a backlit cloud above it. Here people are the flow, as integral to this work as the building. Without us, it's unseen, invisible, and incomplete.
As Jacob Bronowski wrote "man is a singular creature, with gifts unique among animals. He is not a figure in the landscape, he is a shaper of the landscape." Goldsworthy observes and develops the natural shapes of place – air, water, earth, rock, leaves, wood, wool. Easily said, but requiring much strength of will, patience, determination, living on the edge. Talking with my friend Steve Chettle, who set up Goldsworthy's Sheepfolds in Cumbria in 1996, I realised the meticulous preparation that went on to realise these pieces.
A hundred were planned. Some fifty were completed. Prospecting for possible sites, identifying and meeting with landowners, tenants, villagers, councillors, all took time, patience, diplomacy, and money. Even better, the sheep liked them too as, despite what may have seemed to them to be odd or unorthodox variations, they could shelter or be folded into them. That's some accolade. Cumbrian sheep are hard to please.
I go back to my seat. My oriental acquaintances look up, expectant. Looking out, I glimpse Lindisfarne Castle on Holy Island. Luckily, from here, it doesn't look very big. Not a word!
www.nationalgalleries.org/exhibition/andy-goldsworthy-fifty-years
