Where nature and the elements meet

Borrowing bounty from earth's treasure trove, he conjures magic with tantalising, transitory images crafted from ice and snow, leaves and flowers, sticks, stones and animal bones.

Blink and they may have gone, the elements reclaiming them as their own.

Sheep and kangaroo bones, bleached by burning Antipodean sun, are worked into a mound in South Australia; rich red maple leaves tenderly trailed across stark rocks in Japan; dandelion heads crown a Dumfriesshire rock pool; and sculpted sandballs settle on a Californian beach.

Brief glory captured on camera, their fate left to turning tides, easterly winds, pelting rain and rising sun. The landscape is back as it was, stunning in its own right, its brush with art fleeting.

Increasingly, Goldsworthy is leaving a part of himself in a countryside that has claimed him.

He emerges from bright spring sunshine in the hills above Coniston, an unremarkable figure in blue, dust-encrusted overalls to talk about a passion that has enveloped him for seven long years. Sheepfolds.

In a career that has seen acclaim on a worldwide stage, and commissions that have taken him from the North Pole to across America, it seems a little strange to hear he would be proud to be remembered for agricultural relics from a bygone age.

Andy is in Tilberthwaite, putting finishing touches on his 48th fold. The length and breadth of the county, he has taken crumbling old shelters and given them the kiss of life.

Each of the restored structures, already hailed as a major contribution to the arts, bears a classic Goldsworthy touch, from boulder inserts in Casterton to Tilberthwaite's striking circles of slate.

The artist, who has become a legend in his own lifetime, is also currently working on a permanent Jewish holocaust memorial in Manhattan. He has just completed a three-mile long serpentine sculpture in a New Zealand estuary.

But it is sheepfolds he wants to talk about. They have kept him in tune with his roots, with ordinary working people, traditional stone wallers, and an agricultural industry he reveres.

Backed by Cumbria County Council, the National Lottery and the Arts Council, the £460,000 sheepfolds' project was interrupted by the foot-and-mouth crisis.

With only four left to complete when the countryside reopened, they took on a commemorative element to farming and its people, both close to Andy's heart.

"Not memorials as such," said the artist, "though the sculptures within them lend themselves to the trauma of such an event."

He says he undertook the mission because of his love for Cumbria and the times he has had here.

Andy was brought up on the outskirts of Leeds, close to the countryside which ensnared him. He didn't know his dens in the woods, or mud ball bombs with bracken frond appendages, were forerunners to his great works.

Art was the only thing that kept him going at school. By 13, he was working on a farm earning extra cash by washing milk bottles.

"The sculptural nature of agriculture hit me and I started to feed from the images. Ploughing was an incredible sense of a blank piece of paper, scored into beautiful rich earth lines.

"I recognised a quality in haystacks and I still can't explain the feelings of my first sculptural experience, a pile of stones on the back of a trailer which began to take on a quality of their own."

His dad was a professor of mathematics, the son of a slipper maker, and first member of the family to go to university.

There was no academic pressure on Andy though. He knew what he wanted to do. Rejected by Leeds, Hull and Nottingham Polytechnics, he was the last but one candidate to be accepted on a BA course at Preston.

"Studios made art seem so pointless. Outside was where all the meaningful sensations were. The elements and nature's materials led me.

"Art school was liberal in one sense, but not used to the context of outside work in the way I was operating. I did an enormous amount of work that couldn't be argued with. If anyone had tried to stop me, I'd have left."

Living in Morecambe, the bay captured him. He remembers the first day on the beach.

"It didn't matter what I made. I was outside and I was beginning to learn," he once wrote.

"There was a real purpose in having an art that was actually teaching me and that same purpose still sustains me now.

"The feel of a leaf, the crack of a stone, the flow of a river these aren't just sounds and materials, they're life, and all the time there is a deepening relationship with the earth through making."

He said he didn't go into art expecting a career and figured he would be earning a living from farming, gardening, or labouring. In fact he was unemployed for a few years, before getting a gardening job near Appleby, which came with a free cottage, logs and milk.

"I didn't file my first tax return until 1986 and settled in Dumfriesshire, where I still live, because it was cheap.

"I had quite a few difficult years. Things started to happen after I went to Japan in 1987, to work with leaves for three months.

"Since then I have been asked to go to amazing places. The thing is, I'm not a great traveller, I'm happiest staying and working at home."

For the Manhattan holocaust memorial, he has been inspired by trees growing out of stone and is sculpting 15 big boulders.

"The ability of life to survive in the most difficult circumstances struck me," he said. "There is no question of me ever making anything to order."

Andy Goldsworthy's creations come from the heart.