andy goldsworthy brings fifty years of land art indoors for his largest-ever show in edinburgh

andy goldsworthy transforms RSA into a vast landscape

Edinburgh’s Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) becomes a vast landscape for Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years, the artist’s largest indoor exhibition to date, on view through November 2nd, 2025. Organized by the National Galleries of Scotland, the show spans five decades and over 200 works, transforming the historic galleries into an immersive environment of cracked clay walls, windfallen oak branches, suspended reeds, and stones from over 100 graveyards in Dumfriesshire. The exhibition is designed as one continuous, site-specific work that responds directly to the RSA’s architecture, using its spaces, light, and materials as active elements. In doing so, it extends Goldsworthy’s long-term investigation into how people, buildings, and the land are bound together and where they are held apart.

Andy Goldsworthy, Edges made by finding leaves the same size. Tearing one in two. Spitting underneath and pressing flat on to another. Brough, Cumbria. Cherry patch. 4 November 1984, 1984 Cibachrome photograph | all images courtesy of the artist, unless stated otherwise

Fifty Years in edinburgh features over 200 works

Goldsworthy, born in England in 1956 and based in Dumfriesshire for more than forty years, is known internationally for his ephemeral works made from natural materials that include clay, leaves, reeds, ice, stone, and wood. While his permanent outdoor commissions span from the Arctic Circle to Tasmania, his work is rarely seen indoors. This rarity makes Fifty Years exceptional, both in scale and in proximity to the landscapes where he continues to work. The RSA’s location allowed Goldsworthy to create pieces in Dumfriesshire and integrate them directly into the building, erasing the traditional separation between his outdoor practice and exhibition-making. ‘Describing it as an exhibition seems wrong,’ the artist notes. ‘It is a work in its own right.’

The National Galleries of Scotland exhibition fills all of the RSA’s upper rooms and most of the lower floor. In Oak Passage, hundreds of intertwined branches from windfallen oak trees form a narrow, 20-meter-long corridor, recalling the forest floor and the gallery’s own oak flooring. A massive cracked clay wall slices through another space, echoing geological strata and the RSA’s masonry at the same time. One room’s floor is entirely covered with graveyard stones, a meditation on the exchange between body and earth. At the other end of the building, 10,000 reeds appear to pour from a skylight, hovering between rainfall and buoyancy.

Andy Goldsworthy, Elm leaves held with water to fractured bough of fallen elm. Dumfriesshire, Scotland. 29 October 2010, 2010. From Fallen Elm, 2009–ongoing, a suite of ninety archival inkjet prints

the land as collaborator

Themes of access, labor, and the right to roam run throughout the show. Sheep fleeces, marked in the coded colors of different farmers, cascade down the RSA’s main staircase, recalling the agricultural systems that shape rural land use. Red Flags, first installed in New York’s Rockefeller Center in 2020, lines another space with fifty canvas flags stained in red earth from each US state, a reflection on shared ground and political division. 

Goldsworthy’s relationship with the land began in his teenage years working on farms near Leeds, where he learned the manual skills — stacking, digging, and cutting — that underpin his art. Those early experiences evolved into a practice that treats the natural world as a collaborator and subject, attentive to cycles of growth, decay, and renewal. In Fifty Years, the RSA’s neoclassical halls become part of that continuum, reframed as a place where a tree’s afterlife might be felt underfoot, and a building might be seen as an extension of the forest. As he explains, the show invites visitors ‘to see the tree in the building and the building in the woods.’

Andy Goldsworthy, Oak Passage. 2025 and Ferns, 2025

Andy Goldsworthy, Stretched canvas on field, with mineral block removed, after a few days of sheep eating it, 1997

Andy Goldsworthy, Red Wall. 2025

Andy Goldsworthy, Wool. Hung from fallen elm. Dumfriesshire, Scotland. 6 August 2015, 2015, archival inkjet print. From Fallen Elm, 2009–ongoing

Andy Goldsworthy, Frozen patch of snow. Each section carved with a stick. Carried about 150 paces, several broken along the way. Began to thaw as day warmed up. Helbeck, Cumbria. March 1984

Andy Goldsworthy, Hazel stick throws. Banks, Cumbria. 10 July 1980, 1980, suite of nine black-and-white photographs

Andy Goldsworthy, Hedge crawl. Dawn. Frost. Cold hands. Sinderby, England. 4 March 2014, 2014, video still

Andy Goldsworthy, Rain Shadow Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 10 June 2024, 2024

Andy Goldsworthy, Red river rock. Dumfriesshire, Scotland. 19 August 2016, 2016, video still

Andy Goldsworthy, Skylight, 2025

project info:

name: Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years

artist: Andy Goldsworthy 

venue: Royal Scottish Academy (RSA), National Galleries of Scotland | @nationalgalleriesscot

location: Edinburgh, Scotland

dates: July 26th – November 2nd, 2025

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