Andy Goldsworthy and his use of time scale

Andy Goldsworthy was that kid who loved to play in streams and forests for hours and hours.  Lucky for us, the world-renowned British artist never grew out of it.

Much has been written about Goldsworthy's breathtaking nature-based sculptures and outdoor installations, but I would like to draw specific attention to the temporal aspects of his work.  I discussed the notion of "time scale" in artwork in reference to Arthur Ganson's sculptures, and Goldsworthy puts this concept to use better than anyone I have ever seen.  With his outdoor installations, Goldsworthy builds structures out of natural local materials and then gives them up to the environment.  This method allows him to explore the transience of both natural materials and environmental cycles at the same time.  The pieces are created specifically to "decay" in a way that will expose underlying features of the local environment.

The clip above, from the essential film documentary of Goldsworthy's work, Rivers and Tides, provides a perfect example of this transience.  Ever so slowly, the log structure he builds becomes surrounded and then lifted by the rising tide of the ocean.  The structure spins according to the water flow around it, and slowly loses its logs as it is carried out into open water. 

Everybody knows what tides are, and it is no mystery as to when they occur.  What Goldsworthy has done here is draw attention to the time scale it takes for the tide to act on the environment.  It is a slow, meditative pace, but steady and inevitable.  This piece, and others, make you aware of the intrinsic cycles in our environments, such as ebbs and flows, sunlight and darkness, freezing and melting, etc.  Many of these cycles occur in extremely quick or imperceptibly slow time scales, that we, as humans, rarely notice.  Goldsworthy brings them to our attention, subjectively.  Cycles between order and entropy, and life and death, are absolutely intrinsic not only to the environment, but to each of our lives.

The videos below show more film clips of his creations.  In his profound curiosity of the natural world, Goldsworthy speaks for both artists and scientists at the same time:

“You feel as if you’ve touched the heart of a place.  That’s a way of understanding; seeing something you never saw before, that was always there, but you were blind to it.”