Passage

Passage is an eloquent testament to Andy Goldsworthy's determination to both deepen and extend his understanding of the world around him and his relationship with it through his art.

The journeys that people, rivers, landscapes and even stone take through space and time are central to this book. A cairn built at the entrance to the village in Scotland where Goldsworthy lives reveals the importance of his work close to home, which inspires so much that he then creates elsewhere. Three similar cairns now span the United States, marking the artist's own journey across the States as well as the culmination of a form that has long played a significant part in his work.

Works involving elm trees made near his home exemplify his work's vigorous beauty as well as its association with death and decay, here made more poignant by the knowledge that so few elms have survived disease.

Goldsworthy's works on the beach and in rivers, which change in response to the ebb and flow of water, continue his exploration of the passage of time, while a path in Sussex, intended to be walked by moonlight, investigates the impact of light upon the sculpture and place, and the passing from day into night.

Passage also includes Goldsworthy's most recent commission, the Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Here eighteen oak trees were planted in earth-filled boulders, growing in almost impossible circumstances, carry powerful symbolic meaning.