Biography
Andy Goldsworthy’s art work is known as an ‘ephemeral’ or transient. His art work collaborates with nature. His medium of work depicts nature as it truly exists. Goldsworthy was born in 1956 in Cheshire and raised in Yorkshire, England. He studied at Bradford Art College in 1974 to1975 and continued to Lancaster Art College from 1975 to 1978. Andy’s aspiration is to be one with nature through participating in it. Thus, he travels around the globe from England to Scotland and his work has been created at the North Pole, in Japan, the Australian Outback, in the United States and many others.
Goldsworthy regards his creations as transient. His art work begins with an understanding that his creation has a short life span. Therefore, he photographs each piece after contributing his personal spirit into his creation. His art work reflects perseverance as his work is influenced by uncontrollable factor like weather and the nature of the material itself. His art speaks about his intimacy with nature. As Andy quoted “…for me looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. Place is found by walking, direction determined by weather and season. I take the opportunity each day offers: if it is snowing, I work in snow, at leaf-fall it will be leaves; a blown over tree becomes a source of twigs and branches”.
According to the VELS standard curriculum of Science, at level 1 students use their senses to explore the world around them and at level 2 they observe and describe a phenomena by generating questions about situations and phenomena around them. Supporting the Arts dimension at this level of creating and making, the focus is on ideas, skills, techniques, processes, performances and presentations. Through visual arts curriculum in VELS, students at level 3 will be able to comprehend the artwork of Andy Goldsworthy with materials around them and design them through communicating their ideas, feelings and observations of personal experience. They will understand how science and arts work together for an artist and how the art produced gives a deep meaning.
Hence, students will begin to form an understanding of how an ‘Artist’ narrates nature of sciences into a functional body of visual arts. They learn to analyze and develop understanding about their own and Andy’s work thus, finally expressing personal and informed judgments of art works. Here, students would be able to communicate using language of Arts and realize the transdisciplinary relationship that exists between these two domains.
