Serpent In Icicles

Last Friday we by chance discovered that Rivers and Tides was playing downtown. We both wanted to see this documentary so we altered our evening plans a bit to watch this film about the English environmental artist Andy Goldsworthy. He is a sculptor who works with found organic objects in nature, assembling these in patterns whose beauty derives from their ephemerality. In one sequence along a frozen Canadian seashore, he constructs an upright serpentine figure out of bits of icicles; its destiny being to shine briefly in the sun before melting into collapse.

The images in the film are quite striking: the pool by the stream filled with leaves in fall colors, sorted to range from yellow to deep red; the monolithic cones Goldsworthy builds from wood, ice, or stone; the snake of leaves laced together by single twigs leaving a pool to float downstream; the half-mile long wall weaving its way through the woods of the Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.

His wall will last quite awhile. But even when he works with stone, he is keenly aware of the impermanence of natural beauty, from icicle to stone forming a mere continuum. His is an art that seeks essences in earth, stone, growing things, rivers, and the sea. But doesn’t everyone who ever built a sand castle, or played with mud as a kid, long for such contact with earth once again?