ANDY GOLDSWORTHY

I was near to completing four sheepfolds when foot and mouth disease broke out. Work had to be suspended. It was difficult to stop when the Sheepfolds project had gathered such momentum.

As the number of animals culled rose, I began to feel a need to acknowledge the outbreak and my thoughts turned towards a possible memorial sheepfold. I realised however, that possibly the most potent memorial I could have were those four uncompleted folds.

If I had been able to predict the outbreak I might well have responded by making these works, not only because of the sculptures they contain, but also the timing of their making.

The intense activity before the outbreak and the rising expectation of the completed work has given the half-built sculptures a disturbing and sad air about them. Two of the folds were associated with schools. Letters sent from the pupils to thank me talk both of the sculpture and foot and mouth. The two have become interconnected.

I will still try to make works in the future that will somehow mark the event of foot and mouth, but they will inevitably be retrospective memorials to the event. The uncompleted folds have been ingrained by the event - the memory of which they now contain by having been witnesses to the disease’s passage. They mark its arrival, presence and eventual departure.

At the start I felt an initial frustration at not being able to finish the folds, but now realise that had they been completed when foot and mouth started, they would have primarily been associated with its appearance and not its end.

Although not conceived as memorials to foot and mouth, the feelings contained within the sculptures lend themselves to the trauma of such an event. The difficulty and precariousness of farming, especially in upland areas, is an ever-present tension in the Sheepfolds project.

The Pinfold Cones contain works that relate to the Nine Standards on Hartley Fell that stand guardian-like overlooking the Eden Valley. I have also described the sculptures in these folds as being guardians. I have likened the form to that of a seed and an expression of growth and life. Contained within folds they are both protectors and
the protected. A reminder of the pact that should exist between agriculture and nature in which the land will bear fruit but only if treated with respect. I do not often refer to a work as symbolic butif I had to think of a form to express farming’s ability to draw fruit from the land, it would be this form.

The struggle that growth makes lies at the heart of the other two suspended folds. At present each of these folds contains a large boulder through which a hole has been cut and into which a tree will be planted. The planting was supposed to have taken place only a few days after the outbreak occurred. It will now happen when the disease has gone and will be an event made more significant by its passing.

The planting of any tree is a gesture of optimism and renewal - growing out of stone in the protective embrace of a sheepfold will I hope give that gesture a potent mix of feelings - hardship, struggle, renewal, fragility, precariousness and strength. I could think of no better work on my part that could articulate the emotional struggle that has taken place for those living in badly affected areas during this intensely difficult time.