The Key To Understanding

Near the Rodin Sculpture Garden on the Stanford Campus in Palo Alto, California, environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy and eight skilled dry-stone wallers from England and Scotland worked steadily for three weeks in 2001 to construct Stone River. For this sculpture, Goldsworthy and his team chose sandstone salvaged from university buildings destroyed in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes – an original and creative way to reuse local materials.

The 420 foot-long sculpture emerges from within a gentle furrow and gives the feeling of having been excavated from the earth, where it will eventually return. Visitors can physically move along Stone River by following its flowing outline. With Stone River, Goldsworthy strives to make connections between what we call nature and what we call man-made. He beckons us to stop, to stop and see movement of time in the stone.

An abiding theme in Goldsworthy’s art is the natural ephemerality and transcience of life. He says of his photography:

Each work grows, stays, decays – integral parts of a cycle, which the photograph shows at its heights, marking the moment when the work is most alive. There is an intensity about a work at its peak that I hope is expressed in the image. Process and decay are implicit.

Indeed, his own works of art are remarkably vulnerable to weathering and change:

As is everything in the universe. As are we human beings. By accepting the inevitability of change, we gravitate to the part in ourselves that we intuit and know is constant and indestructible.

Nature, observes Goldsworthy, is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding.

Weekly Image ~ above rt ~ Stone River, Andy Goldsworthy.

NOTE: If you’ve visited the Lake District in Great Britain, you might have seen similar dry-stone (without mortar) stonework, still standing after hundreds of years. “A great part of the Lake District…is in the public trust something like our national parks. This because of Beatrix Potter (1866-1943), the writer and illustrator of children’s books, who lived in the Lake District, purchased large tracks of land during her lifetime and left it to the Government with the stipulation that the land be protected and kept in its pristine state…The results of all this are that the Lake District is a beautiful place, undisturbed by development and little changed over the centuries.” Troutbeck, A Visit to the Ancestral Longmire Homes in England, Robert Allen Longmire, Quail Press, 1992, p.3.

Confer: Rivers and Tides, a documentary on the work of Andy Goldsworthy directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer.

Tagged as: Andy Goldsworthy, Art, Beatrix Potter, ephemerality, Lake District England, Rivers and Tides, Robert Allen Longmire, sculpture, Stanford University, Stone River 2001, Thomas Riedelsheimer, transcience