Andy Goldsworthy to Create Stone Field in Stockholm
British artist Andy Goldsworthy has been named Artist of the Year 2027 by Prinsessan Estelles Kulturstiftelse and will create Stone Field, a site-specific permanent installation on Kungliga Djurgården in Stockholm. The work is the eighth commission for Prinsessan Estelles Skulpturpark, the foundation’s outdoor sculpture programme, which adds one new work to the park each year, and marks Goldsworthy’s first permanent public installation anywhere in the Nordic region.
Stone Field takes the bedrock of Ståthållarängen as its point of departure. A 25 by 25 metre dry-stone wall, hand-built from Swedish granite using traditional methods, will enclose a square of exposed rock. The structure forms an open room that visitors can enter and move through, the wall’s exterior following the level of the surrounding ground, its interior tracing the contours of the rock beneath. Dry-stone walls have been a defining feature of Kungliga Djurgården since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historically used to demarcate land, guide paths, and frame the park’s landscapes.
Alongside the permanent work, Goldsworthy will also create a series of temporary works in the forest surrounding Stone Field during 2027, turning attention to glacial cracks in boulders and other traces left by natural processes in the Djurgården landscape. Photography is central to Goldsworthy’s practice, as many of his works are transient and change or disappear over time.
Speaking at the announcement on Djurgården, Goldsworthy described the particular quality of the work’s relationship to time and human presence. For the permanent works, he explained, completion is not an ending: “When they’re finished, that’s when they begin their life. And you never know what kind of life they are going to have.” He also spoke about the social ambition he holds for Stone Field: that it be experienced not as a spectacle but as a place of participation, somewhere people might return to in spring, sit on the exposed rock, and feel themselves part of the landscape.
“With Stone Field I want to make visible the landscape of stone that rests beneath the grass and the trees. Where the wall meets the rock, a living connection arises, like an electrocardiogram measuring the pulse of the earth,” says Goldsworthy.
Goldsworthy, who was born in Cheshire in 1956 and lives and works in Penpont, Dumfriesshire, has worked across five decades with sculpture, installation, photography, and film in landscapes and urban environments. He began working on farms at the age of thirteen, an experience that shaped his close relationship with land, physical labour, and materials such as stone, wood, and wool. His practice spans both large-scale permanent installations and smaller, ephemeral works made from leaves, branches, ice, and other materials gathered on site. In October 2026 he received the Praemium Imperiale in the category of sculpture, one of the most significant prizes in the visual arts.
