In the frame

Artist Andy Goldsworthy is half-way through one of his ‘hedge walks’ – he’s clambered into the heart of the hedge and is painstakingly making his way along it, pushing his way through the branches while his progress is captured by time-lapse photography.

‘It’s a totally different experience,’ he says. He is tempted to give up, but persists. ‘I come into the frame and I leave the frame, it is about passing through.’

Andy Goldsworthy

The 59-year-old Englishman, who has lived in Dumfriesshire for the last 30 years is well known for large works in stone or wood, but is also committed to ‘ephemeral art’ created in the countryside near where he lives. Sculpture from icicles or damp reeds; patterns created with stones or leaves.

Once he spread poppy petals on a rock at Folkestone as the tide came in. The rising water swept the petals away in a swirl of pink, within sight of the harbour from which so many soldiers sailed to war.

Andy Goldsworthy - Ice Sculpture

This transient art speaks of our fragility. I’m reminded of the old metaphor likening life to a bird flying into through a doorway into a warm banqueting hall, across the room, and out into the stormy darkness once more. And of psychiatrist Jung’s thought: ‘life is indeed a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one.’ We seek to find significance in our bittersweet passage across the frame of our story.

The reason Andy Goldsworthy subjects himself to hedge walks is his constant willingness to see things in a different way, and thus to help us see differently also.

‘You can’t ask any more of art than to show you a different world than the one you are already in,’ he says. And of his walks in the country ‘I go to a place and never know what I’m going to do. Art can show you what is there. I’m always amazed how blindingly obvious things are which I’ve never noticed.’

Andy Goldsworthy - sculpture on water

What does he mean by ‘art’? Not, I think, the finished piece, nor the skills involved in its creation. It sounds like it’s the process of looking, and then making which speaks to him.

I believe that what Andy personifies as ‘Art’ is actually the voice of God who calls him, and us, to see things in a radically different way.

Andy Goldsworthy has spent 30 years walking the fields and woodland around his home, getting to know their history; living with them through the seasons; listening, and letting the land speak.

‘I like to work with my hands,’ he tells us. ‘There is an intensity achieved through touch. I need the contact and shock of hand on materials.’

Our eyes opened it becomes blindingly obvious: we see God as a creator artist, a hands-on, listening God, cheerfully at work amid the chaos of a beloved universe, making beautiful things. Sometimes we are the material; the shock is ours as we sense God’s fingers.

But Goldsworthy’s transient works of art, here only until the next tide or the next storm remind us of our role as children of God the artist. We go about our lives open to our surroundings, and listening to the Artist in us, seek in word and action to create something beautiful. A smile, a kind word, a supportive hug, practical help.

Even the most transient things, such as the petals on the rock swamped by the tide of destiny will always, Andy Goldsworthy insists, be part of the history of the place. And his art is meticulously photographed.

And though transient our daily works of love are not forgotten by those whose lives we touch, and become part of their history. And more than that – they are remembered by God.

Recently, a fallen tree Andy has been working with was sawn up and removed, much to his distress. ‘All the potential works I could have made – I still feel their absence.’

This may mirror our regrets over opportunities missed, grace not shown. But perhaps there are always more potential acts of love than we have time and opportunity to realise.  The important thing is to be awake to today’s opportunities.

The story of the bird in the banqueting hall was told in the context of the coming of Christian faith to early England.  All they knew up until then had not enlightened them as to the two great mysteries – where we come from; where we go. ‘If this new teaching has brought any more certain knowledge, it seems only right that we should follow it.’

As we pass through the frame, we glimpse more of the two mysteries which are one, and know that One by name; and we create ephemeral works of love and beauty which live forever in God’s hologram gallery of grace.

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 5th November 2015)