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A little moment of magic happens near the beginning of this documentary portrait of the artist Andy Goldsworthy at work, when a piece of one of his sculptures - a serpentine of ice around the top of a boulder - is illuminated, thoroughly inhabited, by the rising sun, the very thing that will bring about its destruction.

This film is a corrective for anyone who views Goldsworthy's sculptures as a merely whimsical rearrangement of nature. The close-ups of his hands with their blackened, broken nails and plastered cracks is testament enough to that. Rather, it's an attempt to get to the very heart of his enterprise which is an absolute dedication to understanding the elements of the natural world and their interconnected rhythm and flow. In short, this is a film about the dedication and sheer bloody-minded hard work, often in the damp and the freezing cold, that lie behind the sense of joyous, childlike wonder his sculptures can provoke. At one point he is shown working in the middle of winter in Dumfries; beneath his waterproof coat he is wearing three layers of fleece. 'Good art keeps you warm', he says.

Though Goldsworthy's sculptures appear deceptively simple - this is part of their wonder - they are the product of years of working every single day with the tools of his trade: water and earth, wood, stone, leaves, twigs and petals. His understanding of natural engineering is nowhere better illustrated than with his length of green leaves pinned with thorns that slowly unfurls in a river, moving like some reticulated amphibian, twisting and turning downstream. Another little moment of magic.

 

Graeme Hobbs on 15th July 2006
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