‘Seeing Surface Layers’ Eco-Installations After Prints

Inspirational Artist: Andy Goldsworthy

British artist Andy Goldsworthy creates site-specific art. His art process involves using natural materials such as colourful leaves, flowers, plants such as thorns, twig branches, hedge trees, pinecones, mud, stones, icicles and snow. He likes to work outside with the many details of nature, and is known for balancing and stacking rocks, like the New Zealand artist: Chris Booth.

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Goldsworthy prepares materials such as stones, twigs or leaves and rearranges by shaping them in the natural environment. He creates transitory works using his bare hands and found tools, yet, has also created permanent sculptures using machine tools.

He arranges natural materials into numerous shapes and patterns, and then immediately photographs his sculptural installations to show them at their best, before the natural process of change and decay occurs with time, and weather.

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After printing my Virginia Creeper vine leaves in the Printmaking workshop, I created my own digital photographs with the same type of vine leaves, à la Andy Goldsworthy style.

CHANGE: Nature’s seasons change the size, shape, colour, and texture of plants. Each Autumn season, the deciduous Virginia Creeper Vine sheds at maturity. Its green summer leaves transform to dark ruby red, fiery orange and yellow, and to warm brown, before falling from its host.

PALIMPSEST RECYCLING & REUSING NATURE to make an artwork. ECO-INSTALLATION – Connecting back to my first plant-leaf-inspired collage concept, and my leaf prints above, I gathered this leaf plant matter before decay set in. Both Sculptor Tony Cragg and naturalist Sculptor Andy Goldsworthy make connections to nature within their art, and create stacked-up layered sculptures. Like Andy Goldsworthy and Collage artist Fred Tomaselli who both utilise leaves in their artworks, I gave new life to a bunch of brown, crispy, disintegrating leaves by resurrecting them into a new form. I placed this layered leaf eco installation sculpture back into the garden where their layers originally blew in the breeze, and enjoyed the sun and rain. Now, their original dormant host vine sits vacant of leaves and will sleep through Winter, only waking in Spring time to repeat the leaf growth cycle.

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The next step in this Palimpsest process involved connecting nature with human-made processes. As humans convert the natural material of plants such as tree and flax fibre into paper, I therefore converted this paper again by recycling it. After reading a glossy magazine I reused this shiny paper rubbish to create another sculpture. This machine-made printed matter with text and photographs originally came from nature. My sculpture is inspired by plants and their natural growth.

Leaf Sculpture meets Paper Sculpture (AA Magazine printed matter).