Andy Goldsworthy, a British landscape artist, sculptor, photographer, and environmentalist living in Scotland, the subject of our first video screening in 3D says of his own pieces, "Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies I try to tap in my work." And as we saw in his video, 'Rivers and Tides' he does this masterfully and beautifully with a surprisingly sincere sense of humility and simplicity. Taking only himself with him, he seeks out specific sites in nature, maybe in the woods, maybe by a river, maybe by the sea, and creates magnificent earthworks that take intense amounts of time and commitment to create that often are designed to also eventually be destroyed, sometimes only hours after their making, by the very nature he forms them from to start. This is probably my favorite part of his artwork. The fact that he invests no outside materials in his work, and understands the very nature of his nature based art so completely that he knows eventual decay and destruction must play a role to achieve the maximum meaning and beauty possible in his work. I relate to this as a hum an being merely because life itself is beautiful yet finite, eventually we all will decay and go to rejoin the earth. I relate to this as an artist because I to have a strong relationship with nature and the world around me. Forests, rivers, oceans, and leaves, much like Goldsworthy, intrigue me deeply, and love to work with them in my art. There are sometimes when I'm up north or out in the woods or by the sea when I feel a certain 'otherness' like mother nature herself is there, daring me to create something. Inspiring me to do so. I think Goldsworthy feels a similar emotion when he goes out to make his pieces.

Overall I am incredibly fascinated by all of the pieces of Goldsworthy's I've seen. From the fragility of his icicle sculpture that he formed into a snaking river like shape, piece by piece, to his colorful stones lined up under the water, to his giant stone 'seed' pieces that he stacked layer by layer with only the careful placement of each slab to hold them upright. In his stone 'seed' piece another noteworthy thing was adressed in the video, Goldsworthy's attitude about his failures which I think differs significantly from my own and others approaches towards failure. The rocks he was stacking for one of his 'seeds' fell over four times before he was able to complete it. Each time he didn't give up. Instead he humbly explained that it was because he didn't yet understand the nature of the stones that he wasn't able to get it to work, and with each attempt as his understanding grew, so did the shape of his form. I think an extremely valuable lesson can be learned from Goldsworthy's approach towards failure, that if you continue to fail its because you have yet to fully understand what it is you're doing and working with and the only way to get better at it, is it to learn how to make it grow through pressing on and hard work, eventually increasing your understanding and the probability of your success.

Watching 'Rivers and Tides' is to me like getting a sneak peek into the mind of an artistic genius. Goldsworthy takes sections and pieces of the environment around him and transforms them into unexpected and extraordinary artifacts. He then watches as they revert back to where they came from, not regretfully at all. He says, "You feel as if you've touched the heart of the place. Thats a way of understanding. Seeing something that you never saw before, that was always there, but you were blind to it." Then later on he says, as his driftwood igloo gets swept to sea, "It feels as if it's been taken off into another plane, anther world...It doesn't feel t all like destruction." I feel Goldsworthy's very personality and outlook as an artist sets him apart as unique. He possesses great insight not only into how art should work and be understood, but into how life should work and be understood, and It's that kind of attitude I want to strive for in my own work in the future.