Largest ever indoor exhibition by Andy Goldsworthy comes to Scotland

The largest ever indoor exhibition by Andy Goldsworthy will take over the National Galleries of Scotland this summer.

Featuring more than 200 works, the show will include major installations made in response to the iconic Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) building, as well as drawings, photographs, films, sketchbooks and archival items dating back to the mid-1970s and spanning fifty years.  

Born in England in 1956, and based in Dumfriesshire for the past four decades, Goldsworthy is internationally recognised for his work with natural materials such as clay, stones, reeds, branches, leaves, snow and ice. 

Over fifty years, he has created a unique and highly influential body of work that speaks of our relationship with the land. In Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years the land is brought indoors, into Scotland’s capital city.  

Working as a teenager on farms near Leeds in Yorkshire, where he grew up, Goldsworthy developed a passion for working with the land: harrowing the fields, bailing hay, picking out and piling stones, feeding cows and sheep. 

This is where he acquired many of the skills he uses in his practice today: cutting, digging, gathering, stacking, building. Goldsworthy then studied art at Bradford and Preston, while based in Morecombe Bay. 

Andy Goldsworthy.

It was there that he began making ephemeral works in the sand, recording what he made in photographs and film.    

While Goldsworthy is one of the most celebrated figures in contemporary art, his work is seldom seen in exhibitions. He has completed outdoor commissions all around the world, from the Arctic Circle to Tasmania, but the inclusion of his work in museum shows is rare.  

‘The show has come at a particular time for me,’ Goldsworthy said.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever had an exhibition that has paralleled the work that I’m making in the landscape here in Scotland. 

‘That’s because the RSA is not far from where I live, so I have been able to make work in Dumfriesshire alongside visits to the RSA, which has become connected to what I am doing outside. 

‘I couldn’t have done this exhibition anywhere else. Actually, describing it as an exhibition seems wrong – it is a work in its own right.’

Immersive artwork

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years has been conceived by the artist as a single immersive artwork in response to the space, materials and character of the RSA building. 

Occupying all of the upper rooms and most of the lower floor, the exhibition is at once beautiful and ambitious in scale. 

The interrelationship of humans and the working land is a recurrent theme in Goldsworthy’s art and in the exhibition. He often presents the land as a hard, hostile and brutal place. 

Fences and barriers feature prominently, in the form of rusted barbed wire stretched across a room, and a massive, cracked clay wall. As in nature, beauty and danger co-exist. 

Andy Goldsworthy, Hedge crawl. Dawn. Frost. Cold hands. Sinderby, England. 4 March 2014, 2014, video still. Courtesy of the Artist.

In dialogue with the oak floor, the vast 20-metre-long Oak Passage fills the largest room, with hundreds of oak branches forming a narrow path through its centre. 

Made from the leftovers of windfallen trees, the passage acts as a reminder that the gallery floor was once a tree, and that a building is part of nature – just as we are.   

Another highlight is the floor of one large room which is entirely covered with stones left over from gravedigging – collected from over 100 graveyards in Dumfriesshire.

With this new work, Goldsworthy explores the metaphorical correlation between the body and the earth. 

When a body is buried, the body takes the place of the stones, and the stones take the place of the body. 

Red Flags

At the other end of the sculpture court, in contrast, a room will contain 10,000 reeds suspended from a halo on the ceiling. They will appear to rain down from the sky and float above the gallery floor at the same time.

Red Flags was originally created for the main square in the Rockefeller Center in New York and installed there for a month in September 2020. 

The fifty large canvas flags, individually stained with red earth collected from each of the fifty US states, refer equally to difference and similarity, a work, in the words of artist, ‘that talks of connection and not division.’ 

Andy Goldsworthy, Proposal drawing for Oak Passage, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 2024, pencil on photocopied image. Courtesy of the Artist

The colour red features in many of Goldsworthy’s works in the exhibition, referencing blood and the iron content which makes blood red – another connection between our bodies and the land.  

‘Andy Goldsworthy is a unique artist, he has such vision, and his work is extraordinarily beautiful,’ Anne Lyden, Director-General at the National Galleries of Scotland, said. 

‘Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is incredibly special, bringing the land indoors, and only at the National Galleries of Scotland. I’m so excited for everyone in Edinburgh to have the opportunity to visit this wonderful exhibition this summer.’

Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is a National Galleries Scotland exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy building, opening on 26 July 2025.

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