by Sorrel Pompert Robertson

Our series of stories, Know Your Park Lands Art, guide you through various creative displays within your Adelaide Park Lands. This time, we look at ‘Black Spring’ in the Adelaide Botanic Garden.

Since humans began painting animals on cave walls, art and nature have been intrinsically linked.

This was the very beginning of the ‘environmental art’ movement. In modern times, merging the two has also inspired artists, like English sculptor and photographer Andy Goldsworthy, in their work.

Goldsworthy is behind this slate sculpture, Black Spring, which was installed in the Adelaide Botanic Garden (Park 11) in 1992 as part of the Adelaide Festival of Arts.   

A little background on Goldsworthy … He was born in Cheshire, England, in 1956, and was influenced early by the forests around him. He would spend school holidays, working inside the woodland that stood at the edge of the estate he lived in.

As Goldsworthy grew up, he found work in local farms with his brother; a formative experience which drove his understanding of people’s relationship with the land. “Farming is a very sculptural profession – building haystacks or ploughing fields, burning stubble,” he told The Guardian.

Since these beginnings, Goldsworthy has become a prolific sculptor, working with any materials found in nature, such as stone, snow, ice, leaves, trees, or sand.

For much of his work, this has meant a short-lived life for it before it’s melting back into the earth, toppling from its perch, or being pulled out to sea by the coming tide.

But to Goldsworthy, this is evidence of his collaboration with nature, rather than an artist imposing his will.

“Working with nature means working on nature’s terms,” he said. “When I work with a leaf, rock or stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening in the process of life within and around it.

“When I leave it, these processes continue.”

In this way, Goldsworthy has always been inspired by the place itself and what it has to offer. “I am a hunter, I take the opportunities each day offers – if it is snowing, I work with snow.”

Black Spring, in this regard, is different to much of his other work. It was made from Parachilna slate, with the help of stoneworker Joe Smith. The materials used travelled some 480km to the Adelaide Botanic Garden.

But, despite its CBD location and the ‘permanence’ of the structure, Black Spring still gives a nod to the relationship between people and nature. In an interview with Artlink magazine, Goldsworthy explained that, although working with nature felt more ‘alive’, there was a value to working with buildings.

“Everything in the city is nature. Fundamentally, it’s all drawn from the land. But when I’m working with the rock in the land, I’m working with it at its source, and that’s important. I can’t find a source for most things in the city.”

So, an element of nature is lost in the city, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be brought in from the great outdoors, like with Black Spring.  

A defining feature of the installation is the slate cone, with a hole in its peak, inside the walled circle. This demonstrates one recurring motif of Goldsworthy’s.

“The black of a hole is like the flame of a fire. The flame makes the energy of fire visible. The black is the earth’s flame – its energy,” he said.

“I used to say I will make no more holes. Now I know I will always make them. I am drawn to them with the same urge I have to look over a cliff edge. It is possible that the last work I will make will be a hole.”

It’s easy to see his point. Approaching the installation’s slate corral, it appears as just a wall. But it’s impossible not to lean over to see what lies within, and there is an even stronger urge to jump in and stare down the small hole at the top of the low-rising, slate cone.

Like most of Goldsworthy’s sculptures, despite his renown in the art world, there is a noticeable lack of information about Black Spring anywhere.

The installation’s almost-identical sister sculpture, Slate, Hole, Wall — amazingly located on exactly the geometrically opposing line in Edinburgh’s Botanical Garden — suffers the same fate.

I have been searching for answers on Black Spring; on what Goldsworthy wanted to convey, how he saw Adelaide, or the Botanic Garden, or how we were supposed to interpret the piece.

But perhaps that, in itself, is the point of artwork, as much as it is the point of nature. We all have our own experience with it.

It’s the same story with our Adelaide Park Lands — their value is not rooted necessarily in the tangible, but in our experience with the city and our connection to the land.

The various quotes from the artist in this article can be found in Hand to Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976-1990 by Andy Goldsworthy and Terry Friedman.  

For more articles in our Know Your Park Lands Art series, head here: https://www.adelaide-parklands.asn.au/know-your-park-lands-art.  

Sorrel Pompert Robertson is a Falkland Islander, who has been travelling around Australia on a Working Holiday visa for the past year-and-a-half.

She’s recently settled in Adelaide, and with her background in wildlife conservation and communications, she’s enjoying supporting the Adelaide Park Lands cause for the short time she’s here.