When Andy Goldsworthy’s towering sculptural “Spire” in San Francisco’s Presidio was set on fire by suspected arsonists in June 2020, the celebrated British environmental artist was hunkered down at home in rural Scotland due to the COVID-19 pandemic. His longtime San Francisco gallerist, Cheryl Haines, sent him photos of the 100-foot cypress landmark that had stood for 12 years near Inspiration Point aglow with flames.

It was hard to believe, Goldsworthy said, speaking to The Chronicle on a recent sunny afternoon outside the newly relocated Haines Gallery at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.

“Can you imagine, we’re in the midst of the pandemic and the ‘Spire’ gets set on fire, and I see these images? It was an absolute fireball,” he said. “Like the pandemic itself, it was hard to explain or make sense of.”

Goldsworthy has now returned to San Francisco for an exhibit with Haines of new and recent works. “Andy Goldsworthy: Firehouse” opens Saturday, March 12, as the initial show at Haines’ new space on the ground floor of Fort Mason’s Building C, where it has moved after more than three decades at 49 Geary St. near Union Square. The relentlessness and transformational power of fire is a theme throughout much of the work on display, including several ambitious site-responsive pieces the artist was still re-envisioning and tinkering with just days before the opening.

Haines said selecting Goldsworthy for her first show in the new location was a no-brainer, given the fact that she’s been a friend and persistent champion of his work ever since she presented his first West Coast solo exhibition in 1992.

Goldsworthy currently has three public works on display in the Presidio — all created under the auspices of the nonprofit For-Site Foundation, which Haines founded — and a fourth at the old Cliff House in For-Site’s “Lands End” exhibition (on view through March 27). Other area works include “Drawn Stone” outside the de Young Museum, “Stone River” at Stanford University and seven pieces as part of the Hess Collection in Napa.

“I’ve concentrated so much energy and effort here (in the Bay Area), likely more than anywhere outside Scotland,” he said.

Haines notes that Goldsworthy’s fascination with temporality and Earth’s natural rhythms of destruction and rebirth makes him perfectly suited to reflecting our current moment’s collision of unpredictable natural forces, such as drought and fire, with human-wrought disasters like the war in Ukraine and the climate crisis.

“Andy has this uncanny ability to produce work based on a particular moment in time, and he seems to somehow be able to connect the conceptual dots and create works that bring us to the precipice of understanding,” she said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. You just have to trust him and magic happens.”

Even when reflecting on the willful destruction of “Spire,” Goldsworthy was remarkably upbeat.

“The first thing I did when I got here this morning was go see ‘Spire,’ ” he said, describing the experience as “heartening because after all it’s been through, it looks so good.”

After he heard about the fire, Goldsworthy asked the National Park Service to save “a few buckets” of the work’s charred remains.

“I didn’t know what I’d do with it,” he said. Until now.

With more burnt wood he gathered from the “Spire” site, he’s created the new exhibition’s central installation: a stunning monochromatic expanse of blackened bits of “Spire,” which he has spread across a 24-foot-long surface of contiguous trestle tables. He constructed the tables from plywood that had boarded up the space (formerly Readers Bookstore) before Haines moved in. It’s fitting, given the damage to “Spire” and the recent fire seasons Northern Californians have endured, that fire itself is a theme throughout much of the new exhibition.

A series of five photos capture Goldsworthy throwing finely ground ashes into the air, remains of three of his sculptures that have been destroyed by recent fires, in San Francisco, Napa and Whitchurch, England.

。戈兹沃西还创建了一个临时安装in Fort Mason’s historic firehouse, coating its windows with red earth sourced from the Sierra Nevada foothills. He knows the red windows will likely remind visitors of the unforgettable day in September 2020 when wildfire smoke and dense fog turned the Bay Area’s skies an otherworldly orange-red.

“My intention was to come here and make something uplifting,” Goldsworthy said. “Californians have been through an awful lot with the pandemic and the fires. You start off with these intentions, but the art takes its own course. You know, we’re all really living in a firehouse, aren’t we?”

Inside the gallery, in white coveralls, a white Carhartt hat and a black face mask, Goldsworthy’s little exposed skin was coated in fine white dust from working on a massive 19-by-14-foot cracked white clay wall in the gallery’s back room.

“Andy offered to do a new one for us because he knew it was sort of traumatic to leave the old one behind,” Haines said, referring to the photogenic wall of red cracked clay that had been a fixture at 49 Geary since 1996. (Note to prospective renters: The original Goldsworthy is immovable, so it’s staying put in its old digs.)

For the wall, Haines purchased 2,500 pounds of raw white kaolin clay from a mine in Amador County, not far from the Nevada City home where she lived during most of the pandemic and has an artist residency program. Blaise Bertrand, executive design director of San Francisco’s famed Heath Ceramic’s Clay Studio, oversaw its processing.

As Goldsworthy and a team of assistants worked spreading the clay across a wire mesh backing layered with hay, the artist sounded eager to see how, like most of his work, it will fissure, evolve, even surprise over time.

“It’s humid here,” mused Goldsworthy. “I have no idea if a rust color will come through in a grid pattern. We’ll see how resilient it is.”

A week earlier, on the same day Russia invaded Ukraine, Goldsworthy shot a pensive one-hour video of himself standing absolutely still during sunrise on a lava field in Kona, Hawaii. In the video, titled “24 February 2022,” which greets visitors to the new Haines Gallery, his body slowly, almost imperceptibly, emerges in shadow on the lava stone.

“I just stood there thinking, and standing in solidarity,” said Goldsworthy, suggesting visitors to the new exhibit might take a beat to do the same.

“Andy Goldsworthy: Firehouse”:Installation set for noon-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Sunday. Through March 23. Site-responsive solo exhibition 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; Tuesday and Wednesday by appointment. Saturday, March 12, through May 28. Free. Haines Gallery, 2 Marina Blvd., Building C, First Floor, S.F.hainesgallery.com