Andy Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire on July 25, 1956. He was brought up in Yorkshire and studied at Bradford College of Art (1974-75) and Preston Polytechnic (1975-78). After leaving college he lived in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria, before moving to Langholm, Scotland in 1985 and to Penpont one year later. Throughout his career Goldsworthy has mostly worked in the open air, in places as diverse as the Yorkshire Dales, the Lake District, Grize Fiord in the Northern Territories of Canada, the North Pole, Japan, the Australian outback, St. Louis, Missouri, and Dumfriesshire. The materials he employs are those at hand in the remote locations he visits: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns.

Most projects are ephemeral but demonstrate, in their short life, the artist’s extraordinary sense of play and of place. They are recorded as photographs, and book publications are an important aspect of Goldsworthy’s œuvre: showing all aspects of the production of a given piece, each publication is a work of art in its own right. Some of his recent sculptures are of a more permanent nature, being made in stone and placed in locations far from their point of origin, like Herd of Arches (1994). The series of chalk arches created at Sculpture at Goodwood-Cass Sculpture Foundation (now closed) in 1995 are semi-permanent, given the fragility of the material, and are now sited indoors at Goldsworthy’s studio to extend their lifetime.