Rivers and Tides

The projects that Goldsworthy pursued were usually near rivers in the video. Because he was familiar with these locations, he was able to anticipate the cycles that the areas usually undergo and therefore he gave himself sufficient time to work on the projects before the tide or something else came to further develop the works, though there was sometimes setbacks like the with unstable sculptures. He had to account for the expected and unexpected natural occurrences of wind, tides, and animals, among other natural forces and how they may affect the project when he stopped or finished working.

Early in the video, Goldsworthy states how “there are always obsessive forms,” implying that certain forms can be found all over the world like the twisting rivers and tides in the video. However, each river or tide has unfamiliar aspects as well; as a whole they do the same thing, but when observed more intimately, as Goldsworthy does, there are details of one river are found to be vastly different from others. Another example is that we are all human, and we will all do certain things because it is a part of human nature such as eating or learning but what and how we eat or learn varies from person to person.

Goldsworthy creates an ice sculpture on top of a rock that mimics the shape of the river. Upon completion as the sun was setting, the light hit both sides of the rock and illuminated the ice from behind, causing a glow that he did not plan and allowing him to become excited about the work’s potential. The potential he expresses here is found within earth and time. The behavior of earth over an expanse of time can successfully or unsuccessfully enhance the beauty and meaning of an ephemeral work. It is not always possible to expect everything that may happen at a particular site and because of this, potential is always found.

Throughout the video with each of Goldsworthy’s projects, we are reminded that “the very things that bring [a work] to life is the thing that causes its death.” Earth and nature allowed his works to be created, and earth and nature destroyed his work. For example with his ice sculptures, ice was created by the cold climate at the river causing the water to freeze into icicles. The water creates the work, and when frozen with the sun shining down on it, it is melted and, in a sense, is destroyed. At low tide, part of the river’s bed is exposed and it is possible to make a work like the dome of branches on the soft sands but when the high tides comes in, it takes the dome with it and destroys it slowly. These examples reiterate that the things that allow a work to exists, specifically here in nature, are the same things that destroy it; the nature of things give what one needs to create a work and take away from a work because of that same nature.

Goldsworthy does not believe that his works are destroyed even though his works get broken down by nature; instead he sees them as being evolved, mutated, or shifted. He does not create his works to last forever because he knows they cannot; he creates them so they can be changed in some way by their environment. When something is destroyed, it is no longer possible to use or repair it, and it usually has quite a violent connotation like a fire destroying a house. Goldsworthy’s works are “destroyed” peacefully and quietly; they are slowly broken down and it is entirely possible to rebuild. Sand castles are another example of work that is taken away by earth; depending on the tide, the time to do so varies but the sand is always there to rebuild. The power here is that the work never dies and is actually never destroyed. The process of its transience can be considered art and we still can have it again. This can also be reflected in the human experience; an example can be the act of recycling where things are used until they are in some way useless, then later reused as something else. Recyclable items can be transient but they can also be reused.

Time, or the great teacher as Goldsworthy refers to, has taught him about place. In each place he works, he has different time constraints in order to finish his projects like the rising tide or the setting sun; time gives him a certain frame to create his work to the point that if he runs out of it, he cannot complete his project, he cannot change time. It introduces insecurities and unexpectedness because he doesn’t always exactly know what each project will be until he shows up to the site. He can expect many things out of nature like the incoming tide, but he can’t expect that project will fall over four times or the animal that will scratch against the work and knock it over and he doesn’t always plan how sun will impact the work. But those very things can create more powerful art making for Goldsworthy because it, like the objects he uses and the sites he builds upon, is natural.

Despite the frustration, he does not consider the inability to finish a work to be any sort of failure, like when he was creating his egg-like stone structure that fell down as many as four times, setting him back and causing him to be unable to finish the work. Instead he treats these unfinished projects as learning experiences. It teaches him more about earth and the materials he uses and creates a stronger connection with them for future projects as he learns his limits with time and the different natural materials he uses.

When Goldsworthy’s projects are taken out of his specific sites and placed within a museum, they are removed from their natural environment and placed within a room where it loses its connection with nature and what nature may do to it. The shift in location makes the works less meaningful and comprehensive because it seems out of place and has no connection with the room like it does within nature.

Sheep had a significant impact on the landscape of Scotland. There are no trees because forests were turned into farmland for sheep. Goldsworthy explains how sheep affect the grass and how they flow through the land in a similar way that the river does. Humans, however, have a stereotypical view of sheep as just wool-makers; this keeps us from fully experiencing Scotland, in particular, because we have limited our view of how sheep can really impact the land. Goldsworthy has a wall built that reflects the movement of the sheep and the river through the land with wool stretched on the top of it to imply that they are more than just wool; that they move throughout the land and change the way it looks along the way.

Joe Sternfels’s “On this Site” can be associated with Goldsworthy’s project about the presence of sheep in Scotland because they both deal with an absence of what was. Sternfels capture images of places in the U.S. where tragedies took place. The photographs give an impression is something is missing because of they don’t really have a subject and they have a rather sad mood to them. There are no people in the pictures, only places of where they were. Before the sheep in Scotland, there were forests and people; both had to be removed or relocated to make room for the sheep allowing Scotland’s landscape as a whole reflect that people who were once there were replaced by sheep.

About a third of the way through the movie, as he was introducing the concern with sheep, he mentions that there is a dark side to pretty, pastoral landscapes. It only took this one line for me to realize that when I visit a place, unless there is obvious evidence pointing to its past, I do not tend to think twice about how that place is able to exist as it does when I am there. Lands of the U.S. have so much history, but, as history is my least favorite subject, I pay no attention to it. If I did, however, it could quite possibly change my impression of the place and give birth to more ideas. This has caused me to be a bit more curious of a place’s history and how I may be able to incorporate it into my works.