Andy Goldsworthy. Black Holes

Creation and destruction are essential elements of Andy Goldsworthy’s ephemeral sculptures. The black hole, a common shape with which the artist works, hovers in the balance between life and death: “I’ve come to see holes as a kind of entrance, a visual entrance into the earth, into the tree, into stone, that entrance between which life both ebbs and flows."¹ When the artist’s sister-in-law died, the first work he made was a black hole at the base of a tree. It did not just mark an absence but, as the artist explained, “Out of that comes growth. . . . There is nothing more potent to me than a black hole that I’ve made and returning later and seeing a little finger of growth . . . out of that black."² In his 1995 site-specific installation at the San José Museum of Art, Goldsworthy collected two pickup-truck loads of pine branches taken from dead trees marked for clearing in the Sierra Nevada forest near Lake Tahoe. Goldsworthy used the foundry at San José State University to blacken the ends of the sticks, then arranged them on the floor of the Museum’s sculpture court so that the burnt ends formed a black circle at the center. In the Sierras, wildfires are a paradoxical phenomenon—despite their destruction they are vital to the cycles of growth and decay.