Andy Goldsworthy's largest indoor exhibition displays visceral, rural installations using hare's blood, sheep dung on canvas, rusty barbed wire, stained wool and cracked clay to emphasize earth's textures, temperatures, colours and character. Seasonal change appears in a multidecade photographic series of a fallen elm, alongside leaf patterns, woven branches, snow crusts, foxglove lines and rosehips. A related six-mile route across Edinburgh leads to the Royal Botanic Garden, where sunlight filters through a perforated Barbara Hepworth sculpture, and shaded beeches, lavender, a bronze girl in a waterlily pond and an Ian Hamilton Finlay sundial punctuate the landscape.
People walk slowly between two dense hedges of windfallen oak branches, or stand silently in a fragile cage of bulrush stems with light seeping through the mossy skylight overhead. I'm visiting the largest ever indoor exhibition of work by Andy Goldsworthy, one of Britain's most influential nature artists. His recent installations have a visceral sense of rural landscape: hare's blood on paper, sheep shit on canvas, rusty barbed wire, stained wool, cracked clay.
After the exhibition, as a sort of cultural pilgrimage, I'm walking six miles across Edinburgh in search of works by the Dumfriesshire-based Goldsworthy and other artists who engage with the landscape. I start at the Royal Botanic Garden (free and open daily, rbge.org.uk), a short bus ride north of the National Gallery. Just inside the east gate, there's a perforated sculpture by Barbara Hepworth with sunlight pouring through it.
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