The Edinburgh Landscape Gets a Facelift with Andy Goldsworthy’s Installation Art

Nature Sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy

“We often forget that we are nature. Nature is not something separate from us. So, when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.”

-          Andy Goldsworthy

We are cradled in nature, from a time unknown to words and texts. The bond is instinctive, primeval, and inevitable. Then why do we turn our backs to nature, and why do the threats to environmental sustainability come to the fore, while we speak of an eternal connection?

People are so wired to urbanization and industrial growth that they are quite oblivious to the impact their acts have on climate, environment, and our well-being. Voices are raised to address this pressing issue of ecological danger by some nature artists like Andy Goldsworthy, Olafur Eliasson, Barbara Hepworth, Antony Gormley, Charles Jencks and Agnes Denes. Creating organic landscapes, they try to rekindle the bond we have with Mother Earth since time untold.

To experience Andy Goldsworthy art in its true and raw state, take a tour of the ephemeral installations at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, where an enlightening indoor exhibition of nature art takes over your senses. Explore this visceral show, on view from July 26 to November 2, 2025.

If you are someone intrigued with environmental art and happen to be there during the show dates, find out how Goldsworthy has brought the Edinburgh landscape indoors with his canvas of sticks, stones, leaves, blood, and thorns, at the remarkable Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years showcase. Follow us on this blog tour of the city outdoors and the legacy show that smells of farmlands.

Let’s go back to our roots!

Goldsworthy | Edinburgh Sculptures

The Retrospective Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years – Emerging from Barbed Wires, Stones, Sticks

The city of Edinburgh, steeped in history, delves into the immersive nature landscape of Goldsworthy along with its urban fabric. The show at the Royal Scottish Academy unfolds some rare installations where stone, sticks, leaves, and thorns are guided by the hand of a phenomenal landscape artist, who invites viewers into a place-based storytelling shaped by seasons, geology, and memory. It is a tribute to his fifty years of dialogue with nature.

Andy Goldsworthy Art: His Ode to Wilderness Smells of Raw Earth!

The Fifty Years of Goldsworthy commemorative show at the Royal Scottish Academy happens to be one of the largest indoor exhibitions of his career. The exhibition features over 200 works, including photographs, films, drawings, and installations that immerse visitors in eco art by letting them smell raw dung, dust, and haystacks.

“Art has made me look at the world … and engage with what’s around me,” That is exactly what Goldsworthy writes in the notes for his Fifty Years. 

One of the pioneers of contemporary nature artists, Goldsworthy has merged art and environment tales with creations so visceral that they even include materials such as hare’s blood, sheep dung, rusty barbed wire, stained wool, and cracked Dumfriesshire clay. But how could he show his past installations—except through the old photographs and videos?! For that, you have to leave the gallery’s main floor and go downstairs to catch up with his archival works.

The London art circle may have undermined the works of Andy Goldsworthy, calling them too fragile, rural, and too accessible—but the city of Edinburgh reclaims his status as one of the finest British landscape artists of the era.

Cracked Dumfriesshire Clay

Walking the City: Environmental Art and Public Space Create a Harmony

What happens beyond the gallery walls is no less fascinating! Edinburgh’s landscape becomes a living narrative of nature art for an artist like Andy Goldsworthy—an artist intrigued by imperfection!

Goldsworthy was born in Cheshire and grew up on the outskirts of Leeds and has been making nature his confidante since the 1970s, making art amidst rusty and austere setups, experiencing how color faded from a rubbed stone or the changing color of the decayed leaves.

• In the Royal Botanical Garden, Goldsworthy’s stacked slate sculptures sit under a honey-scented weeping lime—to show how the physical world and art converse with each other.

• In the Jupiter Artland, outside Edinburgh, works of Goldsworthy and Ian Hamilton Finley’s landscape sculptures feature some unique insertions of rocks into the trees, placing trees into barn-like structures. Here also, art and architecture seamlessly blend.

• In Goldsworthy’s remarkable ‘Gravestones’ installation, the headstones are the rocks and pebbles cleared from the graves. With the stones, he wanted to create a connection between the animate and the inanimate world—just like the blood and stone. We are all destined to go back to nature when we die, and that’s how he had covered the floor like a rocky beach, reminding us of the journey of how we return to earth.

  
  

Goldsworthy’s public installations involve spatial storytelling, showing his affinity with the British landscape he has in mind.

Themes Woven of Stone, Leaf, Sheepskin, and Time

The legacy exhibition mixes emotions of violence and beauty in his nature art ‘Red Wall’—the cracked clay installation and the sheepskin rug stitched with thorns!

The main hall housing the exhibition offers the viewers a fascinating walk between the two hedges of windfallen branches stacked on the oak floor, where the floor is very much part of the artwork! And one cannot escape the barbed wires, the gravestones, the oak passage, and the red clay wall—all standing together in harmony to remind of the raw sadness of a rural scene. 

The sheepskin carpet at the staircase reminds one of a pastoral air; with a closer look, one can see the thorns pricking all over the benign-looking skin.

Viewers are greeted with a delicate barbed wire hanging, lyrical and flowing—almost mistaken for twigs and grasses!

Andy Goldsworthy Art: Speaking of Mortality and Transience 

Slow cycles | Elm leaves held with water to fractured bough of fallen elm | Dumfriesshire | Photograph | Andy Goldsworthy

Nature and Impermanence

In his works, Goldsworthy embraces the theme of transience—using materials that decay, vanish, or fade with time. His organic landscapes redefine impermanence with leaf imprints, melting snowballs, decaying clay, and seasonal variations, much like his image of elm leaves clinging to the fractured bough of a fallen elm.

Raw and Rural Flavor

The Dumfriesshire-based artist evokes a sensory charm in his artworks which are bold and earthy like the tang of dung, the texture of woven bulrushes, the way thorns are stitched through the softness of sheared wool. Viewers experience an instinctive feeling to engage in the raw physicality of rural landscapes.

Gravestones and Memory

The concept of mortality and memory gets blended in his work like ‘Gravestones’ – here the stones resemble the connection of blood and stone, blurring the boundary between life and death. They remind us of our journey back to earth, in an unceremonious way, just like the strewn stones are laid on earth.

Edinburgh’s Urban Landscape Cradles the Countryside Feeling

Goldsworthy's works make the viewers rethink how they see urban spaces cradled in nature. Anyone taking a tour through Southeast Edinburgh, like Botanic Garden, Jupiter Artland, or stadiums of sculpture, will bow to the nature artists who bring in the power of perception, telling compelling narratives of organic landscapes and environmental sustainability. 

Nature as Sculpture: Renewing Our Shared Connection through Organic Art

Reconnecting to nature through environmental art

Goldsworthy writes a new narrative of the Edinburgh city with a layered tale of stone and leaf, seasons and decay, history and mortality. In Stone, Leaf, and Time, the materials and the organic feeling of the gallery hall are not mere backdrops, but active collaborators. Goldsworthy’s art makes one think of our role within the vast creation, our shared heritage with Mother Earth, and the fleeting beauty of transience.

For anyone intrigued by eco art sculptures or curious about how nature-inspired art transforms public spaces, these shows and walkthroughs offer the perfect opportunity to explore. Come and witness how landscape artists like Andy Goldsworthy place rural textures within the urban gallery hall and gardens of Edinburgh, celebrating the long-standing British tradition of bringing the outdoors in.