Andy Goldsworthy on colour......

 I seem to have become lost in the writing of my dissertation over the past month or so, and the making and experimental aspect of my practice has been on hold. Today I revisited this video of Andy Goldsworthy and his lecture on colour to remind me that I am not alone in my thought processes and there is someone else out there that thinks just like I do!! He talks about how the colour in nature intensifies energy and visualizes the intensity of growth and death in nature. His eye is drawn to every aspect of colour through the seasons utilizing the materials found within the space he inhabits. He doesn't know what he is going to make before he gets there it is only while observing and spending time in a place/space that he then connects and intervenes with the materials. He is sensitive to place and observes with intensity what is around him.
​He talks about the importance of water and how this enhances and intensifies colour (something which I am acutely aware of at the moment with recent frozen pigment experiments)
​Every potential mark making material he comes into contact with he utilizes. He recounts the knocking down of a hare on his way home one night and how he used the blood from the hare to make work. The colour red he is especially drawn to its vibrancy and what it communicates; a colour that signifies life and death and the brutality of nature.
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Blood Hare Drawing Andy Goldsworthy

Much of the work he does outdoors is made with such delicacy of structural composition it is extremely fragile and susceptible to collapse or evaporation. Mimicking the fragility of life itself.   
​Contrast of materials and colour is highly relevant to his work. Permanent forms he has made in the landscape and the elemental changes around them  over the years. Cairns on a moorland, the growth around them and the subsequent burning, the violence of this action, the colours and aesthetical changes that come from this, the change on this landscape because of this, the rejuvenation of the land and the return of growth even after the violence of burning all produce texture and colour.
​He is attuned to the seasons and embraces the materiality of the land. Elemental changes and the potential for these actions to form marks are embraced...................  
​My work up until the end of summer 2016 has been mostly subtle organic contrasts of browns and decaying materials against white backgrounds, I plan to embrace colour in the next phase of my work.........