When we arrive, there’s a crowd of people milling around in the entrance hall, nobody looking too sure what to do. An official-looking person with a lanyard and some sort of scanner looks around the room. “Anyone else for the five thirty viewing?”

I look over at Anisa and we quickly glance around to see if we’re skipping ahead of anyone else. When nobody else moves, we shuffle towards the official, me frantically trying to make sure the QR codes on our tickets are visible on my phone screen.

“Thank you” he smiles after scanning our tickets. “The exhibition is on two levels, and starts just up these stairs.” We thank him and are on our way. Oddly, nobody else seems to be heading up the stairs, preferring to mill around and cause confusion for newcomers.

I wonder if this is part of the exhibit. It would be cool if it was, somehow.

The stone steps up to the first hall have a runner spilling down the centre, clearly sheepskin or clipped wool, with pink and blue dyes from the sheep still on it. I wonder what the evening will have in store.

I knew very little about Andy Goldsworthy before I attended the exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland, a retrospective of fifty years of his work. Anisa had said a few times that she really wanted to go, and we had both then promptly forgotten about it. I had been reminded that week that this was the last weekend, and had booked tickets as a surprise. She had been thrilled.

I was curious, but no more than that. I assumed I would definitely be a “plus one” to this event, happy mainly to watch Anisa get excited about things. I always feel out of my depth at exhibitions, especially for people who are well known. I become painfully aware of how much I don’t know, and it has a tendency to distract me.

All of that ended when I got to the top of the stairs.

Barricading our way from one side of the hall to the other was what looked like a loosely-knitted wall, stretched from one pillar to another. The wall was all sorts of autumnal hues, red, orange, some green, some grey, some yellow. It looked very inviting to the touch, despite the signs strongly advising against this.

I moved closer, and realised that this was no wall of yarn. I felt myself drawn even closer, right to where the material was wound around the pillar, then connected back with itself to form the wall.

It was barbed wire. Miles of it, intricately wound, entwined, and then stretched across the hall. The whole thing was likely four metres high, perhaps eight across. The colours were completely natural, being the rusted and worn parts of the wire.

The whole thing demanded consideration of the craft of the construction. How had this been installed? It was a true installation, too, recruiting the extant pillars of the gallery to its cause. This was not something constructed elsewhere and then imported. The art had been created here, by hands.

I winced at the obvious injury that must have been sustained during its construction.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” a gallery employee was standing next to me. I realised that my nose was maybe a couple of inches from the barbs, my glasses off so that I could see more closely (my age being now advanced to the curse of constantly removing and replacing my glasses as the situation demands). I mumbled some awed “Yes, I was convinced it was wool…”.

“We get a lot of that. I got to watch the team installing this, and I still have no idea how they worked it. I’m sure there was a full health and safety inspection, but still…”

He trailed off, then started pointing out various details: the tufts of wool still caught in the barbs from unfortunate sheep who had strayed too close (much as I was doing now), the fact that the lines did not all go straight from one pillar to the other, but meandered, straying from their lanes to provide the occasional diagonal, connecting threads.

But throughout it all, I found myself disappointed. A team had produced this. Not an artist, but a group. And this was the first thing we saw? How connected was this Andy Goldsworthy to his art? Was he simply an art director, taking credit for the graft of others?

As I would learn, in a way yes, but if so, he had earned it.

We moved to the next rooms: a dark room filled with broken stones, which had been displaced from the ground when graves had been dug. This room was lit by a skylight during the day, but being the night time (Edinburgh in November rarely sees sunlight after 4pm) torches had been provided. The whole thing was oddly insistent, demanding that I see past the fact that it was “just a room full of stones” and instead grapple with the practicality of it. They had been moved, lifted, placed. They looked evenly laid out, still natural, but clearly this was not a natural occurrence. The artifice of nature in a gallery room, brought here at great effort, all to evoke… something. These had been displaced by humans after their lives had ended, and now were exhibited.

The art was impossible to engage with fully without the knowledge of the construction. I was starting to see a theme here even though I assumed another team had been employed here as well.

The next room was a collection of reeds suspended from the ceiling. Again, these were four metres tall at least, impossibly long for reeds, and arranged in a maze around the perimeter of the skylight (this room was the twin of the previous one with the stones). In pitch darkness, we were provided torches, the light from those walking through the maze casting moving shadows like bar-codes on the walls. My vertigo kicked in and I had to leave Anisa to explore alone while I steadied myself on the back wall, listening to another gallery staff member explaining that there was no fixtures to keep the reeds in place. They were jammed into a shelf at the ceiling level, and then subsequent reeds were jammed into the hollow ends of the ones above, leading to the surprising height. There they dangled, free-floating. When some fell, they would be carefully replaced before the next showing.

I found the patterns on the wall mesmerising, not just because of the vertigo they induced. I found myself jealous of being unable to explore the maze myself.

The next room featured a wall taken up by dried mud, a vibrant red colour and cracked from the baking heat of the sun. Four by four metres, at least, and mounted vertically so that the viewer felt they were looking down on the ground. Cracks regular to the sides divided the otherwise random breaks into almost perfect squares, making me wonder what mechanism caused such regularity. Was the surface prepared in some way to force this regularity, or was there some underlying crystal structure to the mud? The plaque (much like the rest) offered no such information, only the raw details of what I was looking at. Meaning and understanding were something the viewer was clearly invited to bring themselves.

Another wall showed pieces made from a dead hare whose carcass had been filled with snow and allowed to drain on to parchment. As gruesome as this sounded, the results were stunningly beautiful, black and red and white ink-blot tests upon which to project your own ideas. Prior to being told the method of creation for these pieces, one had revealed to me the image of a dancing hare or rabbit, feet outstretched, ears high above its head as it whirled like a top.

Onward, we moved to the centrepiece, an oak “walkway” along the length of the next room. Wind-fallen branches of oak trees arranged in two rows along the floor, from the outside looking simply like piles, but from either end of the path between, the edges resolved to sharp, crisp lines. Walking the path, it was clear that like the reeds, there was nothing holding these pieces of wood in place other than the tangle of the other branches themselves. And yet regularity emerged from the chaos.

By this point I had ceased caring about how many or how few people had been involved in these creations, and was simply allowing them to flow through me as experiences. There was something mystical about the colocation of such natural, seemingly randomly assembled materials and the harsh, mechanical regularity that demanded attention be paid to the assembly.

The room after was the one that broke me. Photograph after photograph of scenes in forests. A felled tree with an interesting crack in its bark, but with vividly golden leaves applied to the edge of the crack, then darker and darker hues applied further out, till the crack seemed a black void surrounded by glowing light. The same effect achieved with the same crack, but this time using fallen snow and judicious clearing of the snow in layers to highlight the crack as though cut through sprinkled icing sugar. In another photograph, a particular branch in a pile of branches was chosen to be covered in bright yellow leaves, plastered down to give the effect that the branch itself had been painted.

Another picture showed snow cleared from a succession of fallen branches to give the impression that a dark path had been cut across them all, a jarring negative space in the snow-covered dell.

On and on these photographs went, one optical illusion after another, gently snapping my brain.

I had to leave the room before it became too much. I’m still unsure how to name the feeling that I had. Overwhelm, perhaps, mixed with awe, mixed with some dissonance arising from trying to square the natural setting and materials with the artifice.

We moved on, downstairs now to his earlier work.

Up till now, the rooms themselves had been compounding somewhat. As I moved between the pieces, I found that each new piece made me review the last in new light, such that I had a distinct impression of carrying an increasing “load” as the rooms progressed. I suspect this is what lead to that last room overwhelming me in some way, the common threads of the work all colliding and giving me a glimpse of an overarching… what? Not narrative. I did not feel that he had been trying to tell a cohesive story with these pieces. It was more that each piece had come from a common source, a drive, a need to express… something.

It was downstairs that this something started to make sense. There were only three rooms downstairs, with a more intimate, restrained feeling. This was clearly his earlier work, and gave more of an impression of the artist himself. Here he is, hauling himself through twisted trees and filming the endeavour on super-8 film. Another, he’s walking through frozen ground barefoot, the ice breaking under his weight as we watch his feet, blue and muddy, plunge into the freezing bog below. Each step making itself felt in my own feet, the artist’s silence with each step as impressive as any of the works upstairs.

Then here he is spitting into the air, or at least here are some photographs of him trying to capture it, failing most of the time but in one frame, there he is, time frozen at just the right moment. Yet more of him trying to capture a bundle of sticks thrown into the air. These shots are all taken on film, meaning that nobody had any idea whether any of them would be workable till after the film was developed.

Now he’s trying to capture a rainbow by hitting a pool with a stick, and photographing as the droplets hit the sun. Two or three successful shots, but how long had all this taken? How many rolls of film discarded, how many visits to the pond to try again, how many days where the light wasn’t right?

Then finally, the earliest work, but echoing into the future: split stones arranged such that each gap aligns, rendering the viewer unable to unsee the single, unified crack through the stones. Or a perfect circle of golden leaves on green, made by ripping leaves and sticking them to matching ones and arranging to create the illusion.

All through, this striving to shock us into seeing… what? I came away with a profound sense of humans as being a part of nature, and of our difficulty in seeing this. We dismiss as “unnatural” anything we create, but are any of these pieces “unnatural”? Any more than an inexplicable boulder in an otherwise empty plain, deposited aeons prior by some wandering glacier? Or the Giant’s Causeway of Fingal’s Cave, once thought so unnaturally regular as to be clear evidence of construction, but now understood to simply be a result of the way lava cools?

I left the exhibition somewhat stunned, feeling both apart from and a part of the natural world, sad that I could not immediately return to see the initial works with these fresh eyes (given that this was the last day of the exhibition), but also quite sure that part of this impermanence was the point. We are all our own creations, in many ways, and the biggest revelation to me was that the creation is as much in what we choose to see around us, what we pay attention to, as in how we choose to respond to it.