Discovering Andy Goldsworthy

Imagine a work of art that is so ephemeral it is itself almost not there, and yet the very nature of the work brings what is there into focus, making it more present, more “there”— communicating this presence more than words ever could, communicating meaning sometimes playfully, sometimes forcefully, but always primally, instinctually.

I recently viewed a pair of documentaries on Goldsworthy, a British environmental artist and sculptor: Rivers and Tides, from 2001 and Leaning into the Wind, from 2018, both directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer.

The documentaries are a great way to accompany him into these landscapes, watch him work, listen to him struggle to define what he does, and then let the work speak for itself, in its own language, mute or deafening loud, proclaiming a foreverness in stone or a soft,fleeting thing taken by the breeze or washed away by light drizzle. Photographs are the recordings of the ephemeral works, and there are many published books I’m discovering as I scratch the surface on what he’s done.

He uses found items in situ, the leaves, branches rocks, water, ice, clay, and either gives them spirit or releases their spirit in a way that we can share, I’m not sure which.

Goldsworthy is the guy that walks through the landscape, forest or jungle or mountainside, and notices things. He has a sense of time that seems exponentially off from the modern world. He is interested in spaces made by nature and people moving through those spaces and waking us up to them. If nature is a component to the spirit of a place, Goldsworthy wakes us up to that spirit, gently, bringing out through his work what I would call the humble sublime. You could think him childlike, the way he plays at what he does, the way you sense that there are no boundaries or rules to his play, the near innocence of it. But what he does is not a child’s game, not when the result is at turns this beautiful or heartbreaking or breathtaking. You do have to slow down your modern sense of scheduled time, with its calendar notifications, with its itineraried agendas and general impatience to get things done. Goldsworthy seems to show that if you can do this, you will be rewarded.

On a bright Sunday in April, days after the azaleas and dogwoods have blossomed, I walk down the path in the garden and notice the moss that we’ve let spread over the pavers. So green. Greener than the grass. The reds and pinks of the flowers are startling next to this green. So, Goldsworthy-style, I sit down and lay the azalea blossoms down, picking out the stamens (?), tearing the ring of petals once so I can lay it flat on the stones, circling a patch of green moss. Red closest to its complement the green, then fuchsia, then the pink with the fuchsia spray, then white. You begin to notice the stems and green cup where the petals spread, and the yellow tip where the pollen sits, and the actual dewdrops on the petals. Birds perch nearby, wondering what I’m doing. As does the dog, confused by my stillness. The sun has moved a bit into late morning, and then spotlights my wreath. I take a picture before the playful breeze carries it away.

Alys Beach: Imagined Thresholds

When my beach reads are Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Susanna Clark’s Piranesi, my stroll through the seaside community of Alys Beach becomes more than a sightseeing tour through thoughtful variations on the theme of white stucco houses, but also an exercise of an overactive imagination spilling into architectural and psychological profiling. Probably my own. I’ve chosen photographs of eight doors from the community and wrote little stories to accompany them. Fictions, perhaps. But truthful ones.

He remembered when they climbed into the Colosseum at night, up to the top, beyond where the tourists go. He was with Romans, he was in their city, they had a guitar and bottles of wine. The brick came loose from his step up the canted pilaster. ”Take it!” they said. “You’ll remember us forever! And The Eternal City!” Was it original, two thousand years old? Or was it from one of the renovations? None of them knew. He traveled with that brick in his rucksack through his Eurail pass adventure that hot summer in the nineties, poor in lira and francs and pounds but so rich in spirit and that youthful optimism that is one part fear and two parts blind faith that refuses doubt.

Years later now, those Romans are still his friends, and he has built a house by the sea. He still has the brick, his Italian contraband. He showed the brick to his builder: “Surround the door with bricks like this.” Long. Thin. He will see them each time he enters. His friends will recognize the gesture. And the light here is the same pale gold in the late afternoon as he felt in Rome: Warm and alive.

She should have known then, the first time she was invited in, that her initial steps from the cool, shaded alley across the tall threshold and into the bright squinting pool courtyard, with its spilling fountain laughing somewhere beyond, and its perfect axis aligned to all the rooms she would explore straight ahead of her, each with their alternating shadows and brightnesses, aligned like all her future days and nights, and the rip of blue sky and palm frond and flitting bird wing and flowered seasalt air above, and the sound of his bare feet just ahead of her on the limestone, and the brightness of his eyes still a retina memory in her own eyes, her first tentative steps that followed him in: she should have known then that the threshold would change her, and that she would never be the same.

She could never reverse through that threshold and return to her old self.

She already thought of that woman as someone else.

The couple wanted a door that would be just like looking at their nearby sea, a door with an opening above it where the breeze would breathe through their courtyard. “The blue of the door should match the particular color of the sea just beyond the sandbar,” they said. Right where the sandy depths began to give way to the slow, gentle descent to the dark, the blue you see roughly half-way to the horizon; your eye could pick it out easily from the beach, though it was harder to discern when out in the waves, floating amongst the blues, the sunlight waving across your toes below you on its way down to its deepest reach. As if the sea had its own blue door.

They asked the painter to match their door to this part of the sea but they had no idea the color would grow dark or bright or shiny or dull and always change its blue mood to exactly match that of the waters, it was a magic they laughed at, and they questioned their own sense of wonder, and if they were just conjuring the idea of it in their minds. But if that were true, they thought, how were they both seeing the same blue?

They realized at that moment, each looking into the eyes of the other, that they were always conjuring their own reality together.

At first glance, so much about their relationship was about compromise: two headstrong, heartstrong people committed to being in love, each figuring out how to surrender lovingly to the other. The irresistible force meeting the immovable object. Each used to getting their own way, they slowly and willingly learned that compromise does not mean weakness or failure, but instead could be the revelation of a new thing they could create together.

Their argument over which direction their beach house door should face (north, for the cool, non-direct light; or west, for the dramatic warm sunset) was settled by the Boolean carving out of the corner by the architect: a compromise where they both would be happy, and where the resulting form would forever stand as a unique testament to that decisive moment.

Clubs. Diamonds. Hearts. Spades. The ironwork in the wood door, set in a rotated square, refers to each of these in general and none of them in particular. Perhaps they refer to playing cards, or even older tarot decks.

The door is shaped like a parted curtain. Games are played inside, the door seems to hint, and this house is but a tent, a carnival mirage. We are starting to believe that there is nothing that is true residing inside, only sunburnt fictions, seducing stories we desperately want to be real. The resident’s friends remember their visits only as dreams, where they gambled and won, or lost big, and the wine never ran dry as they permitted themselves, for once in their lives, to risk it all, to chance it, to try on lies that would never fit elsewhere. One needed only to knock, and enter. They each describe the Owner so differently that there is no consensus on his identity. They are not even sure if they’ve ever seen him outside his door.

She found a house by the sea that spoke to her, and through its open-mouthed, wooden-arched double doors it whispered: ‘I will help you forget all that troubles you, that itinerary-life from where you came; come inside, we will measure your life instead with tides and winds, the skypath of the sun and the infinite dawning of the starry night.’ Could a house do this for her?

The first time she passed through the doors she felt the cool of the vestibule and like a veil of forgetfulness she lost memory of the inessential things.

The second time she passed through the doors, sandyfooted and salty, the veil took from her all worry for the things she couldn’t remember, and she slept with the window open, rocked gently by the far-off waves.

The third time she passed through the doors, in the silence of the second vestibule hidden from the outside, she remembered only her breathing, and only then when it came to mind. Her dependable heart beat without reminding. That night she slept in an empty bliss, and her parents came to her in her dreams, pleading on the steps outside the open double doors, mute silhouettes under the new moon.

My father chose the lot in the seaside village where we would build a house and spend our summers, those youthful summers that we remember as never seeming to end. He collected select pieces of wood from the scrub oaks that were on the lot before it was cleared, hard gnarled wood, with trunks no thicker than his thigh. His contribution to the construction was the design and crafting of our courtyard gate from that oak wood right from this very place. ‘It sheltered this land when it was a tree, and it will shelter us still. It knows it is still home. It remembers,’ he said. Still, he needed saws and vises and glues and stains to bend the wood to his will. Now it stands bright in the beachlight. Oddly, it is the only door in our courtyard house; spaces and rooms flow one from the next, easily and gently like the approaching and retreating sea foam or a visiting breeze.

I have a theory that I never shared with my father when he was alive: the gate he made had a power of remembering. Anyone coming in, handling the gate, sat and shared our hospitality and our open house, and then couldn’t help but share a story that they had not recalled in so long but now was so vivid and real. Some would be overcome with memories, always happy, sometimes bittersweet. It happened to us, too. I think my father knew this to be true as well but never revealed it out loud.

I’ve seen it all. We’ve seen it all, I should say, and we’ve seen it together.

The ebullient joys and the unspoken sorrows.

Her Perfect words that settled into Perfect poetry.

My numbers self-configuring into self-knowing maths.

Little successes and even littler failures.

The ever-faster whirl of seasons.

Great grandchildren absorbing the sun and the sea here with unimaginable vigor.

Makes us feel surely we will live forever.

The generations gather at this house, this white door carved into this white wall that lets the sun play in its recesses, with these white marble spherical sentries like our perfect words and perfect maths sphinxpaw-like on either side.

We are not old but Platonic and pure.

We are not an archeology of time but instead Sun-bleached and stripped of all that is unnecessary.

Come in, describe your day with words and numbers.

They will write equations of love all by themselves here.

We will understand.

Song Lyric: Possession

You’re apparent as the air,

Necessary and everywhere,

And like everything you share,

A possession that can’t be held.

What you give may be enough,

Your eyes are open, your hands are cupped,

And everything you’ve given up

Just possessions that can’t be held.

Beautiful blue bottles of night,

Covered mirrors in candlelight,

You put everything out of sight

Like possessions that can’t be held.

Take what I believe

From what I’ve known,

Take what I need

From what I don’t,

Take everything I own

But those possessions that can’t be held.

For every secret, one is told.

For every word in trust, one is sold.

For every thing we tried to hold,

There’s a possession that can’t be held.

Conch (Study), inkwash