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The news was announced today at the British Ambassador’s Residence in Stockholm, with the artist himself in attendance. The work will be the eighth in the collection and the most ambitious to date. Construction is already under way, carried out by a team of Scottish stonemasons working alongside Swedish workers. The installation, a square granite wall measuring 25 by 25 metres, enclosing an area where the bedrock has been exposed, will be officially unveiled in June next year.
Andy Goldsworthy is one of the most prominent artists of our time, known both for his ephemeral works that melt and decay and for his large-scale permanent landscape installations. He’s also very much in the international art spotlight right now. As recently as October 28, he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, often described as the Nobel Prize of the art world, in recognition of his lifetime’s work.
Walls are one of Andy Goldsworthy’s most recurring motifs, and Stone Field is part of a series of three interconnected works. The other two are Grave Stones in Scotland and Boulder Field in New Hampshire, USA.
Goldsworthy has had the vision for Stone Field since the 1980s, but only now has everything fallen into place.
‘It’s almost like a saga that’s come true,’ explained Goldsworthy, who has spent decades searching for exactly the right bedrock and conditions.
Once Stone Field is complete, the idea is for visitors to step onto the exposed rock and interact with the site. Through this, Andy Goldsworthy hopes to turn visitors from spectators into participants and strengthen our connection with the earth and landscape, something he says has become even more important in the digital age.
‘To lie on the bedrock, on Mother Earth... to lie there in the sun in spring, and to feel the stone, to feel the sun... it could be quite beautiful.’
Like the other artworks in the collection, Stone Field is funded by private donors through the Princess Estelle Cultural Foundation.