Ephemera in the Woods

In one of Wallace Stevens' best-known poems, the speaker places a jar on a hill in Tennessee. “It made the slovenly wilderness / Surround that hill. // The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild.” In Levitated Mass, one of Michael Heizer’s best known art works, he “placed” a 340-ton boulder over a below-ground walkway in Los Angeles. A little closer to Athens, Georgia, over the past several weeks, people walking the trails at the State Botanical Garden of Georgia have noticed long rows of fallen branches running parallel to the paths. At first these seemed to be arbitrary piles of woodsy flotsam perhaps gathered up by some whimsical workers among the many volunteers that help maintain the place. But the number of windrows increased and they acquired the suggestion of order, appearing to run along hillsides like contour lines on a topo map. And then the first structure (a circle about four feet in diameter, two feet high, and constructed from small logs and branches) appeared near one of the trails. Then a second in another section of the grounds.

The structures, I've since discovered, are the work of Athens-based land artist Chris Taylor, who plans at least two dozen. When completed, they will comprise "Garden Nests: An ephemeral and exertive interpretation of home." It's an installation, in the words of the artist, "illustrating Athens as both a permanent home to its residents, and a transient home for students, teachers, artists, musicians, scientists, and the like. Whether temporary or for a lifetime, the home you create is suited to your needs, using what's around you, and moved if necessary. Anyone can create a home with the right opportunity and accessibility."

As does any construct in nature—a jar on a hillside in Tennessee, a suspended boulder outside the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, a spiral jetty extending into Great Salt Lake, six miles of silver fabric hanging over the Arkansas River, or a pyramid near El Giza, Egypt—"Garden Nests" invites a close look at the forms that human culture imposes on the natural world and the artistic statements that result.

In his fine essay in The Georgia Review’s Fall 2008 issue, “Forms and Structures,” Stephen Dunn quotes his own—considerably shorter—“Little Essay on Form” in its entirety: “We build the corral as we reinvent the horse.” Leave it to a poet to nail a metaphor so well, a metaphor that can withstand being poked and prodded until it reveals its depth and weight.

Among the examples Dunn employs is the work of Scottish sculptor and photographer Andy Goldsworthy, who for the last four decades has created forms from natural objects and enacted moments that for him embody past, present, and future time. Goldsworthy’s work ranges anywhere from small and ephemeral designs of autumn leaves laid out on an open hillside, to lines of connected grasses set adrift in a stream, to near-monumental stone arches—seemingly just about any creation imaginable, idiosyncratic, and innovative.   

Goldsworthy’s goal is to understand the natural world through touch, to work with the qualities of any given material, to understand the material’s place by engaging with its qualities and its history, and ultimately, as an artist, to create a form, to build Dunn’s corral for a new way of seeing: colored leaves as palate, icicles as prisms, fallen branches as walls. Heizer has famously said: “I’m self-entertaining. My dialog is with myself.” Goldsworthy too. Much of what is derived from his art is his own. What he learns of rock from balancing one on another, of cold by crafting shapes from icicles, of gravity by building a doorway of twigs, of snow by throwing it into the wind—all this knowledge is Goldsworthy’s and his alone. For someone seeing images of his work or those lucky enough to visit the more permanent sites, Goldsworthy’s attention to the traditions of art reveal a primarily modernist aesthetic. The nature of his structures provides the connection.

By way of example, consider Goldsworthy’s 1999 construction of a driftwood dome at the mouth of an estuary near Halifax, Nova Scotia. Ideally, a place will suggest to him what direction the work will take. So when his introduction to the beach was “a river and a pool that was being turned by the river,” he saw immediately the potential: on a rising tide, a confluence of “two energies at the powerful moment when the sea and river meet.” To understand this moment, he began to replicate what he called the “turning pool” by gathering bleached driftwood to build a dome on the rocky shore beside the pool.  Working from inside, he placed the driftwood in a circular motion until it reached about six feet high, then crawled out the bottom. He left an opening in the top—because looking into a hole makes him “. . . aware of the potent energies within the earth.”  Then he waited for the moment when the energies of the sea, the river, and the earth would come together. Goldsworthy’s work focuses on such moments, but all of his materials—that is, elements of the natural world—will persist in some form and, prior to his intervention, existed in yet another. As he says, “The more I worked, the more aware I became of the powerful sense of time embedded in place. The moment of my working a material and of my being there was bound up with what had gone before.” The future, on the other hand, is a lesson in impermanence.

The moment arrived. When the incoming tide reached the turning pool and the dome, it first pulled the lowest sticks away. Then it lifted the entire structure and began to turn it just as the river is turned twice each day. Finally the tide pulled the dome free of the pool and carried it slowly upstream. Goldsworthy recalled his feelings watching the dome drift away as it foundered gently: “It feels like it’s being taken off into another plane, into another world or another work. It doesn’t feel at all like destruction. It feels as if you’ve touched the heart of the place. That’s the way of understanding, seeing something you never saw before that was always there but you were blind to it. I followed the sticks upstream—darkness was falling—eventually leaving it to drift off into the night towards the town.”   

As Dunn asserts, “Essentially, form’s job is to help reveal content. . . . It guides the eye.” For Goldsworthy, it alters how we understand not only the material but also the space and energy around the material. Form, then, is the principal enabler of transformation in art. The corral is built, the horse is reinvented. Artists build and we stand by; in their process of creating, they give us a vantage point. What we readers and viewers do with the experience is up to us. As I watched film of Goldsworthy’s dome disappearing on the rising tide, I thought about other turning forms: channel whelks, my failing ears, and—about as far away from a cold beach in Nova Scotia as you can get—a cliff at Chaco Canyon where Ancestral Puebloans carved the emblem of their emergence, a spiral on a sandstone wall.

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Photo by Chris Taylor. Discover more images of his compelling work at 34 Degrees North -Land Art.

Goldsworthy quotations are from Andy Goldsworthy: Rivers and Tides (Dir. Thomas Riedelsheimer, 2001) and Andy Goldsworthy’s Time (Abrams, 2000).