GARDENVALE PRIMARY SCHOOL
MICHELE JONES - VISUAL ARTS COORDINATOR

ENVIRONMENTAL VISUAL ART

A STUDY OF ARTIST ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

As part of Outdoor Education at Gardenvale Primary School, environmental issues form an integral part of the school camp program. While attending a Middle School and Senior School camp earlier this year, a perfect opportunity arose for studying the works of environmental artist, Andy Goldsworthy. This is a brilliant art activity to undertake in a rural/bush setting, as it requires no laborious preparation, increases an awareness of the elements in nature, it creates a total immersion in the project and the end results promote self esteem, team cohesion and a great sense of accomplishment for all students.

 

PROCEDURE:

Gather the students in an indoor area where there are no distractions. An overhead projector would be the absolute ideal, but enlarged photocopies of Goldsworthy's artwork would also suffice.

I believe it is essential to spend time to motivate, stimulate and excite students about their art and this activity is no exception. During this session I spoke about the life of Andy Goldsworthy, his ideals and goals, and showed them a wide variety of his artwork. You will find that they are absolutely amazed by his work and are more than willing to sit and discuss their ideas for an extended period of time.

It is also extremely important to discuss safety aspects related to this activity, and that the environment is not to be damaged in any way. I prefer to create the groups, as it offers another opportunity for students to socialise with different members of their class.

Emphasise that the materials the groups collect could vary in colour, texture, shape and size, could show movement, direction, patterns or line, and could be on the ground or even wrapped around existing objects! Encourage the students to create abstract designs, rather than objects, such as people or animals.

This activity was planned to take approximately 45 minutes, but nearly one and a half hours later, students were still pleading for more time!! The groups all reassembled and together, the whole class moved from artwork to artwork, taking digital photographs from a variety of angles. Each group discussed their concept and ideas and rated their team cooperation. The really amazing feedback I received about this activity was, that over the next four days, whenever students had free time, groups could be found around the property, creating and photographing additional artwork.

Students recorded their finished work using the digital camera and these photographs were later printed in colour and mounted on black cover paper behind a sheet of overhead film to create a "glass and clips" effect.

In order to expose students to using computer technology in their visual art presentation, they were also given the opportunity to experiment with printing their work using a variety of picture effects, such as negative mode and overexposed modes. This added yet another dimension to the environmental artwork.

This picture was created using digital photographs of environmental art, printed in the "negative" mode. The effects were absolutely amazing!

EXAMPLES OF KIDS WORK

ABOUT ARTIST ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

Andy Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire in 1956 and was brought up in Yorkshire. He studied at Bradford College of Art (1974-75) and Preston Polytechnic (1975-78). After leaving college Goldsworthy lived in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. He moved over the border to Langholm, Dumfriesshire, in 1985 and to Penpont one year later.

Throughout his career, most of Goldsworthy's work has been made 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 uses are those to hand in the remote locations he visits: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns. Most works are ephemeral but demonstrate, in their short life, Goldsworthy's extraordinary sense of play and of place.

The shapes he works from his raw materials are basic: spiral, circle, cone, arch, column, sphere, and undulating line. Often a form will encircle a naturally occurring object, such as a tree or boulder. Other times his forms seem to play with objects, hanging from them or leading to them. Some are designed to play with light and shadow. All have the effect of integrating the area around them as part of the finished sculpture.

Twigs will be counterbalanced and stabilized with thorns to form a screen through which we might see the sun sinking behind a grove of trees. Coloured leaves are gathered and thorned' to a supporting branch creating a subtle rainbow. We realize that leaves are more than green, yellow, red and brown. The play of light upon the form further reminds us of the sun's role in creating leaves and life. Goldsworthy is constantly reminding us to look again, to recognize and realize the connections between the elements.

Another quality of Goldsworthy's sculptures is to convey a strong sense of place. Ice arches along a frozen river bank, twigs wrapped around a stone, leaves creating a bridge between the trunks of a tree all contained within the photographs in his books.

He is a wonderful role model for children, particularly in the areas of sensitivity to the environment and thoughtful, creative engagement with the environment. Goldsworthy rarely uses living plant materials in his work, nor does he make sculptures intended to last for longer than the materials themselves. Ice sculptures are allowed to melt, leaves to fall from their thorny supports, twigs to fall in place as they might have naturally.

The works are recorded as photographs. Book publication is an important aspect of Andy Goldsworthy's work: showing all aspects of the production of a given work, each publication is a work of art in its own right.