Andy Goldsworthy is a legacy of nature nurtured art and self discovery; a natural-born artist talented to portray images through the palette of time. Time, to him, anticipated as a result of acknowledged periodicity. His artwork begins as a series of dummies and with time, just as a tide which can be fully predicted, it becomes the result of creative process with highs, lows and subsiding episodes. The progression is as important as the result. Goldsworthy turns a place into diverse scenarios for him to create art; he is able to predict successions of a site by knowing the present because he has witnessed such transformations before: seasonality of winter into spring, day breaking of darkness into light, vegetation’s growth, decay, blooming and shedding, water flowing and accumulating. He frames all these processes as his projects’ objectives accordingly and then ignites the proper energy to carry them out, whether to build something, to achieve stability or to diminish and erase undesirable effects.
He is highly influenced by English pristine landscapes and northern rural sights. Thus, he directs his tasks like the ancient rural people did, by looking into nature and its cycles, interconnecting his own ideas with the whole; never acting in an isolated fashion. Goldsworthy has an inner wisdom which he has acquired as a result of the collective existence of the objects he perceives as artwork. His methods for anticipating “time” focus on looking at a simple object as a particle of the universe and understanding its position, certain that everything else is subjected to the same rules and will respond in the same ways.
This unique artist emphasizes a sense of place, by manifesting the rules prevailing in each site and location, which, although affecting the entire world on a larger scale, are adjusted in unique forms at each spot. This situation allows him to renovate his compositions each time because life recreates same patterns, yet it always does it by following a principle of diversity and variability.
His sculptures are an evidence of his own learning of an inner will which animates objects, an amazing hidden force or power prevailing in everything, a desire to cope and reunite with our surroundings. Even inanimate forms seam to have a mind of their own and he is fascinated by allowing his own projects to shape themselves as a result of this internal flexibility.
The underlying principle of birth and death is not necessarily destruction, but recreation. Goldsworthy no longer conceives time in a linear way but in a circle, or an ellipse where matter and energy are in constant transformation giving the illusion of life and death, beginning and end; although for Goldsworthy there are no such extremes regardless of his own desire to grasp his existence. Matter is for him immortal and glorious and he knows it will always change shape, but will never get destroyed.
There is a sharp distinction between destruction/mutilation and shifting/evolving and the basis lays in the intentional desire to interrupt natural courses, processes and phenomena. When the most powerful forces in nature (fire, earthquakes, lightning) strike a particular site, the outcome should not be judged instantaneously, but for the eye of an artist the apparent devastation is nothing else but the new beginning of life, a balancing force to establish equilibrium. Such equilibrium, understood not as a static scenario but as a harmonic balance of forces acting upon mater in order to allow constant change.
This scenario is different from a situation in which something gets manipulated with external and artificial sources of transformation, and it may be something small, almost intangible, a petite creature that, when removed purposefully from its niche will erode complex and powerful pyramids of interrelationships so finely tuned that a simple intromission results in mutilation and final destruction.
His exhibits emphasize time as the factor allowing us to see every angle of truth. Time portrays place in every angle. For example, a grove in the winter may seam lifeless and cause in us a reaction of malfunction while in reality, by being able to observe the same tree through the four seasons, we understand that winter is only a stage of cleansing the tree from parasites, allowing him a dormant stage to recover, to build sap so rich and abundant that in the spring the hours of light trigger the beginning of bearing new leaves, flowers, and robust foliage. Certain aspects of landscape, although bare, are just the first sketches of a rich and bountiful palette.
As a student double majoring in music and art, I have chosen the liberal side as the instruction of learning because it promises to be spontaneous, give me no name for grading art but the opportunity to incorporate “mistakes” as a way of improvement, allowing myself to be acted upon. Without failures we can never adjust, flex, and bend to strengthen ourselves. However there are mistakes which may bring severe consequences or are immersed in a social context which has not reached maturity as to recognize where real wisdom lies. Music and art, as compared to law for instance, are more gentle paths of learning and discovering myself.
Goldsworthy has an intention to communicate to an audience. Museums allow him to expose himself to others, to reveal his inward spirit to the surroundings. His museographic work becomes a suitable method to share his journey and his legacy to whomever has initiated a quest of self discovery. The real experience of self discovery changes when he invites viewers through his exhibitions to know who they are, and how to introduce themselves. More than the destination he highlights the enormous opportunities to create each other’s path and be in constant eagerness to seek. Every now and then something in nature or someone moves him. These “markers” allow him to glimpse bits and pieces of his truth. The shift occurs when he longs to share his creations with other.
Nature is his inspiration. The limitless solitude found in waters from riverine landscapes and wetlands illuminated his first projects. Autumn tones in Northern forests became tributaries of his pattern’s compositions, and their conspicuous colors ignited his senses.Constant as the tide, Goldsworthy is eager to show himself, sharing through art the time alone and the joy that he finds in living, inviting everyone to create their own testimonies and celebrating together a way to combine patterns and colors for self discovery.
Time is a key factor. We seldom acknowledge progression and cycling, and this in turn becomes entrapped or stagnated in the present, in the moment, in a site, loosing faith in the process of everlasting life. By remaining static rather than dynamic in or daily lives, we are impeded to see the very angles of truth each situation brings. Goldsworthy employs a very creative, yet obvious method to build an explanation. To him, the reality of how “sheep” impact place is a metaphor revealing how they change, integrate and act upon a collective behavior by following each other and loosing any sense of individualism. When we act like sheep, we become an overwhelming large entity, we all become one and deprive ourselves from direct observation and the possibility to occasion reflection. As a consequence our collective impact is deeper, the isolated contact and action of each individual in touch with surrounding vanishes, eroding in turn the lives of many other beings which are not meant to buffer impact of a major force.
Absence is a subjective term for Goldsworthy, since he is able to trace the impact of one element upon the rest of organisms, populations and living communities within a landscape. Goldsworthy recognized the specificity of roles within each piece of the great picture and that element like a puzzle piece, has specific edges or interrelations with other parts of the picture; thus, even absent or gone, we can be certain of its missing role within the whole. Goldsworthy is also able to link the consequences of absence of any apparently insignificant element from a niche by assessing the impact caused on the rest.
The entire movie opened my eyes to the tapestry of life, before so pale that I easily oversaw it. The movie reminds me of the poetic perspective of Walt Whitman, “Song of myself” as he acknowledges with other words the possible impact that a simple pebble could have upon a star.
