On a sultry morning in early August, sculptor Andy Goldsworthy stood in a quarry in Stony Creek, Connecticut, watching the heart being burned out of a ten-ton granite boulder. Eighteen of these tawny-gray brutes, varying between three and fifteen tons, are to be scattered around a space measuring a hundred and twenty feet by thirty-five on the second-story roof terrace of the new extension of the Museum of Jewish Heritage, in Battery Park City. The hollowed rocks will then be filled with soil, and, on September 16th, Holocaust survivors will plant a dwarf chestnut-oak sapling in each one, creating a memorial Garden of Stones.
The rock surrenders to the fire, Goldsworthy said, because fire created it in the first place. But fire cleans as well as sculpts. Shooting flames at granite not only re-enacts primordial geology but converts the incinerations of genocide into the flames of sanctification.
During a break from the burning, we peered into the opened belly of the rock. The interior was speckled gray, with shreds of stone flaking away from the walls or pulverized into a granular silica, like sand on a beach, some of the grains glassily fused. John Ruskin’s feverishly beautiful passages on “Compact Crystallines,” in “Modern Painters,” came to mind, in which he describes the glitter of granite as looking “somewhat like that of a coarse piece of freshly broken loaf sugar.”
The cavity is conical, a form that much preoccupies Goldsworthy, who often declares a debt to Brancusi. Monti was working from the opened base and down the narrowing funnel. Once hollowed, the rocks are inverted, so that the saplings can sit at the neck of the boulder, atop their bed of earth. The disproportion between the hefty stones and the tiny, six-inch plants may risk looking absurd, but it will at least preclude any possibility of the stones’ resembling the oversized planters commonplace in corporate atriums. Instead, a mysterious hatching will be inaugurated: the sprig from the rock.
The growth process of the sprouting menhirs, standing between the Hudson and Ground Zero, will not, however, be risk-free. Tom Whitlow, a Cornell plant ecologist whom Goldsworthy consulted, warned that if the growing tree should press against its unyielding stone girdle it could crush the living cambium immediately beneath the bark. In that case, the root system would atrophy and die. But unlike many contemporary artists, fretful about their posterity, Goldsworthy incorporates the indeterminate outcomes of natural processes into most of his work. Sculptures created from found materials like ice and thorns, driftwood, and even bleached kangaroo bones all presuppose that artistic design will yield to the cycles of time and climate, whether over an hour or a decade.
Goldsworthy relishes the embattled growth of his dwarf chestnut oaks, contending with the jackhammer shaking of downtown construction, the judder of helicopter rotors on the riverbank, sudden gusts of estuarine winds, and the murky air of lower Manhattan. The plants’ fight for survival against the odds is meant as an emblem of the Jewish experience they memorialize. “The trees I wanted couldn’t be decorative,” he says. “They needed to be tough little S.O.B.s.”
On August 22nd, three weeks before the inauguration of the Garden of Stones, the last boulders were hoisted into their positions on the museum roof, and it was already apparent that Goldsworthy’s sculpture would be one of the most powerful monuments in a city still struggling to find visual expressions for the tug between the perishable and the imperishable.
Full story at The New Yorker
Some time ago, we blogged about the environmental art of 
The Royal Botanical Gardens is hosting an Earth Art Exhibit, curated by Grande and sponsored by PRIME Gallery in Toronto. The Royal Botanical Gardens is the largest botanical garden in Canada within the Niagara Escarpment — a UNESCO World Biosphere Reserve.
Emilie Brzezinski has created a stand of willow trunks within a Stonehenge of gnarled old cherry trees at the Royal Botanical Gardens. It is entitled Willow Winds.
Sharon Loper’s exhibit, Nests, comprises synthesized hummingbird nests. Two oversized, fabricated hummingbird nests, ranging from 0.6 to 1.5 metres in height, are constructed from metal bars, wire, hemp hair, cotton batting, and gathered natural material. Loper states, “The nest represents nature in its most perfect symbolism, in that the nest is shelter, an enclosure, a safe place where life is sustained. We all live in a time when hyper-reality is the norm. The nest brings us back to less complicated values and uses nature as a vehicle. The nest is a window, a place where life begins.”
Reflections Flowing is a site sculpture that touches the earth lightly, if at all. Roy Staab, who created the installation in Grindstone Creek Marsh and who is shown during the installation, says, “I think about being ‘in tune’ with nature. In this work, I use an S-curved line and consider the length of open water for its size. It is made of fragile vegetation gathered from the Royal Botanical Gardens — phragmite reeds and saplings that are invasive yet wonderful for making my art. The reeds are interlaced into the saplings. The quiet area of Grindstone Creek Marsh permits my art to almost be a part of nature, especially when reflected in the water. It is vulnerable in the stream, for a moment of life.”
“In an earlier work, Sketch for New Forest, I used oak sawdust and shavings, the waste material created when an oak tree is transformed into lumber, to ‘draw’ a full-sized oak tree on a gallery floor — temporarily returning the material to its original form. With Ground, I use a similar material, tree mulch, but with an opposite intent — to obscure or erase the form of a dying ash tree by burying the tree beneath the material/memory of other trees. Set in one of the avenues of trees in the Arboretum, Ground also playfully echoes and exaggerates both the topography of the site and the ubiquitous mounds of mulch placed around the base of many of the trees by the gardeners.”
Art critic John Grande writes about environmental art in his book, Balance: Art and Nature
To develop a dialogue more in touch with nature, Grande argues that artists should favour their specific culture and the diversity of the ecological communities in which they live rather than the homogenizing pressures of internationalism. He asserts that contemporary artists’ preoccupation with international “market recognition,” often reinforced by museums and funders, promotes a “product standardization” that takes precedence over any desire to represent one’s own culture and bioregion. In such a horizontal milieu, artists and their works consequently become easily interchangeable. The attendant appropriation of Third World, tribal and extranational art styles not only mirrors acts of economic expropriation but also often ensures the commercial success of the collusive artists. Such appropriation barely pauses to appreciate the source culture’s context and meaning.
Goldsworthy is a sculptor, photographer and environmentalist living in Scotland who produces site-specific sculpture and land art situated in natural and urban settings. His art involves the use of natural and found objects to create both temporary and permanent sculptures which draw out the character of their environment.
Rivers and Tides is a 2001 documentary about the artist, directed by filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer. The film received a number of awards, including the San Diego Film Critics Society and the San Francisco Film Critics Circle awards for best documentary. Now with this deeply moving film, shot in four countries and across four seasons, and the first major film he has allowed to be made, the elusive element of time adheres to his sculpture.
