Leaf throws, Blairgowerie, Perthshire, Tayside, 3 January 1989

British sculptor and land artist Andy Goldsworthy works with the natural landscape producing site specific sculptures and installations. Working in locations as diverse as the North Pole, the Lake District in England, the Australian desert and Dumfriesshire, south west Scotland, where he has lived since 1986, Goldsworthy’s works are reliant on the environment and weather and he brings nothing with him to a location using only natural and found objects.

As his works are mostly ephemeral, photography plays an important role documenting their transient state. Goldsworthy has said: “Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit.”1 In this case the artist has not carefully placed objects in the landscape but captured a moment when in collaboration with nature he consigns the leaves to the wind.

1. http://www.boutwelldrapergallery.com.au/imagesart/bdg_Goldsworthy_Text2_for_web.pdf