Rivers and Tides (2001): B+

Overlook Scottish sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s occasional dips into vague New Age abstraction, and Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time is an absorbing portrait of a unique artist’s professional and personal communion with nature. Goldsworthy’s medium is the earth itself, and Riedelsheimer’s documentary follows the gray-bearded 46-year-old husband and father as he produces circuitous, serpentine structures (which he calls “earthworks”) out of indigenous elements (sticks, leaves, branches, dirt, dust, ice and rock) on beaches, in forests and in rivers. As his compositions are both fashioned from, and situated amidst, the environment, Goldsworthy’s work actively engages in a dialogue with its surroundings, a discourse with the soil and sea that Goldworthy also undertakes during the protracted – and, as many collapsing sculptures indicate, not always successful – hand-crafting of his materials into art. Regular references to “the line” and “the flow” of his pieces reveal the artist’s desire to understand the fundamental energy that governs all of nature’s elements, and when Goldsworthy crushes rock into red powder, the link between the stone’s crimson color and that of human blood marks his handiwork as an attempt at self-comprehension. Since his constructions are made from organic elements and often strategically positioned to be erased by the rising tide or swallowed up by the ever-growing flora, Goldsworthy’s work is transient, a condition that deliberately speaks to his fascination with nature’s cyclical creative (i.e. his seed-shaped edifices) and destructive forces. Because these earthworks are so fragile and fleeting, Goldsworthy uses still photographs as a further means of study and preservation. And Riedelsheimer’s mesmerizing cinematic case study – which beautifully depicts Goldsworthy creating a rock wall in upstate New York, a slithering ice structure built on a protruding Nova Scotia boulder, and a chain of brightly colored leaves floating along a river’s current – in effect functions as yet another step in the Scotsman’s approach to studying, communicating with, and immortalizing both his artistic outdoor endeavors and, in the process, the wondrous, mysterious world around him.