Andy Goldsworthy’s “Road Line”: An Interview
In early September 2024, world-renowned artist Andy Goldsworthy returned to College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, Maine, to complete Road Line, the granite curbstone that snakes across the campus from Eden Street to Frenchman Bay. Mostly finished last year, the 1,500-foot-long permanent piece lacked an ending where it wound down to the college’s dock.
On a visit to the site, Goldsworthy sat down for an interview in a nearby wooded enclave, the temporary “office” for the artist while on site. The transcript has been lightly edited.
Art New England: In an interview about your College of the Atlantic piece, you said, “I saw there was the road and I saw there was the sea and I saw there was a campus in between.” Is that how the concept for Road Line started?
Andy Goldsworthy: Well, the concept started way before coming to Mount Desert Island. It came from the work I had been engaged with in granite on the east coast of America. I don’t get many opportunities to work with granite where I am in Scotland, even though I have a little bit—well, we do have a lot of granite, but it’s not exactly where I live. It’s nearby. I’ve never really worked with that.
But it’s not just the stone. It’s the granite industry here [in Maine]. There’s a wealth of knowledge and connection to the stone and the buildings and the land that [offers] a particularly interesting context.
So, it was working with the quarries and going into the quarries and, I guess, seeing the curved curb stones. I think, “What are these curves?” and then the realization that you can make those curves with granite. You cannot do it with other stone if it’s too embedded. It’s the ability to chop granite that allows these curves to be made. And then seeing the roads and the extraordinary curves that are in the roads.
The number of radii that are used for producing regular curves is just quite extraordinary—from two foot six to 70 feet radii and even beyond there at one time. We’ve got 80, I think 85 radii [in Road Line], which is almost imperceptible. The eye and the skill and the care involved is fascinating, but it’s also the movement that that line becomes over the road and the connection to the road, the connection to journeys.
So, I had that in my mind and I’d proposed it for a place in New Hampshire, which didn’t come to fruition. And when this commission came up…. There are certain works that I’m really waiting to make, and these are some of the most important works.
Art New England: They’re simmering.
Andy Goldsworthy: They’re simmering, looking for the right context. I have to wait and some will never be made in my lifetime. And then, because it was COVID and I couldn’t come here, I had to look at Google Earth and I could see the road to the sea.
Art New England: I came to one of [College of the Atlantic President] Darron Collins’s Thursday afternoon tours of Road Line and he mentioned how diligent you were about working around trees, to avoid disturbing roots.
Goldsworthy: Of course. I mean, I don’t want to cause any damage. So, it’s finding a way through. It’s the context here. The students leave the road, come into campus and have a journey. You know, it’s a line that is an unconventional line, one would hope.
Art New England: It is very unconventional.
Goldsworthy: It is. And it was in the spirit of the college. When you’re working with a curb, you’re working with roads and you’re working with people’s journeys. When students leave here, when they step on the curb, anywhere they go, I hope it reminds them of the line that is here.
I have a similar line—not a similar line because it’s made of wood—in the Presidio [in San Francisco], in bent trees, and it’s walked and everybody walks it differently. They take what the line means to them, how they walk it. I hope that Road Line will have a similar life here, the way it’s walked.
Art New England: I’ve been joking that the next Philippe Petit is going to start here.
Goldsworthy: Yes, but on a bicycle—it has to be a little tougher than just walking it—a unicycle.
Art New England: Is there something about the color of granite that appeals to you?
Goldsworthy: Color doesn’t interest me, well, very rarely. Occasionally the color of the stone interests me, but it’s primarily about the structure; the color is secondary. It’s funny because most people think that’s the first thing I’d be interested in. And it’s like, why? Because it’s the inside, not how it looks on the outside.
Art New England: There are a number of different colored granites.
Goldsworthy: There are, but I wouldn’t have liked to have had a red one in here or any other color. You could have red and black and it would be like a coral snake and that would give a certain movement to it that might be interesting, who knows? But for [Road Line] I wanted to keep it very, very simple.
Art New England: You have noted that to appear effortless requires enormous effort.
Goldsworthy: Well, you can see the effort coming back to [Road Line] this time. We started in the meadow and you can see—I can see—it’s not as tight, it’s not as taut, it’s struggling. And there was a huge amount of effort went into trying to figure out how to extract the tautest line possible. And I think it was only when we got over the brow of the hill that I really got going.
Then coming back this time, this bit is beautiful. And now I know how to do it.
And that in a way is etched into the work too. You know, the bits I can see where, aw, if I’d just done this, but it’s part of the journey that the line made. But it was a struggle to get it looking as if it just smoothly glides through the place.
Art New England: I was just thinking about when you talked about walking off the campus on a journey to another place, you’re also coming down to the sea, which is also a place of embarkation.
Goldsworthy: Yes. And also, when people come off the boats, having been on the water, this sinuous fluid line is leading their way onto the land.
I’m just so thrilled we managed to finish this, to do this last part. It has given far more to the whole work than just the section that has been completed. It’s raised the whole thing.
Art New England: In the past, you’ve paid tribute to manual labor. You’ve said there’s a huge intelligence to manual labor, that it’s so underrated. I was here yesterday watching the pouring of the cement and witnessed the skill and strength.
Goldsworthy: It’s the importance of touch as well, to understand materials through touch and to get to know what they can do. That connection between the hand and the material and the brain is incredibly important.
I don’t know if you know Jacob Bronowski, the [Polish-British] scientist and mathematician in the eighties, nineties. He wrote The Ascent of Man after The Descent of Man from Darwin. He says in there that the hand is the cutting edge of the mind. And that’s something that we are really going to struggle with. I mean, we’re making these incredible things, computer-generated forms and shapes, but what’s the point of making? It’s not just about the object that you produce. It’s the thing that object has generated in its making and afterwards. But the making is really important in my mind. I need to work with things.
And when you see people who work manually, there’s a need to be effective about your labor. You learn how to do things fluidly with a certain amount of ease, even though it is a very physical job.
Art New England: You are a landscape artist; you work with the lay of the land. How is it working on a former Bar Harbor seaside estate?
Goldsworthy: Actually, I’m probably more comfortable in a place like this, making a work like this, here. I get more anxious working in what could be termed a wilderness. I mean, it wouldn’t stop me working there. But I feel less of an anxiety about going to somewhere where there is already a precedent of the passage of people who come through here. It puts my life, my touch, my work, my footstep into context. I like that. It is a good context for me to work in. I think people don’t really understand the importance of the social nature of the landscape, the human nature that we’re part of.
Art New England: It makes me think of Thomas Urquhart’s book, For the Beauty of the Earth. He reflects on the impact of human and natural history upon each other. He’s originally from England and writes about hedgerows and other aspects of the countryside.
Goldsworthy: They are beautiful, but it’s like the walls, which you also would say are beautiful, but the walls came out of a time when the land was cleared of trees, and the walls are part of farming, a very destructive force. Walls are also things that prevent people from passing through. They’re restrictive. The hedges are too. I’ve done works where I’ve crawled in hedges and come out bloodied. Hedges were the barbed wire of their day.
So, this view of nature and all the quintessential pastoral hedges and walls and all the rest—I get all that. But I also see that there is a tension in that. I don’t have a rosy view and I don’t like the kind of romantic sort of view of things. There’s a brutality about walls. I’ve made works with hedges and walls and barbed wire that address that.
Art New England: I’ve been helping with a project on Hurricane Island off the coast of Maine. It had a massive quarry with hundreds of people living on a small island. It has that kind of romantic quality, you know, with the stone cutters from Italy, Portugal. But that’s not the real picture.
Goldsworthy: They were prisoners, buying from the company store. They were trapped there for life. Yeah. It was grim.
Art New England: I was wondering where Road Line fits into your overall oeuvre.
Goldsworthy: My very first wall was a sculpture I made in 1989 in Scotland where I live. And when I climbed the hill to look down on it, I could see how it connected to existing wall and how you’re tapping into a network. They’re like rivers, these walls. So, I see all the walls that I’ve made since Storm King somehow connected and this is the furthest north I’ve got. And the line that it takes is a different rendition of the same line.
Road Line is very much in the spirit of the Storm King wall. And there’s a walking wall that I made in Kansas City too.
Strangely enough, the Storm King wall in many ways feels less designed than this. The Storm King wall is rugged, it’s a wall. But Storm King was more designed than this because these are all regular curb sizes. This isn’t something I’ve drawn out and then had it cut. I’ve used what’s come off the shelf. It’s like going to the woods and working with the branches that I find, like the Presidio line. So, I do like that, there’s a discipline in that, and extracting an impossibly sinuous line out of something that is actually all around us.
Art New England: One last quote of yours. You said somewhere that art reveals what’s there. What’s there on the College of the Atlantic campus that we now see?
Goldsworthy: Well, you know, yesterday, in the morning I came down here and it was a sunny morning, a beautiful sunny morning. I just stood at the dock and looked down and there was a stone with a flat face covered in water. I have a photograph of it with this bright mirror-like surface. And then it dried and there was nothing there. And I think that’s what I love. It showed me that stone’s relation to light, to the place, in a very simple way.
I would hope to feel that my work at College of the Atlantic is a line that somehow feels as if it is there in the footsteps of the students that have passed through.
[More information and photos of Road Line can be found on Goldsworthy’s website: Road Line – Andy Goldsworthy.]
Carl Little covers Maine for Art New England.