JCNT - May 2025 Release - Full Release - Flipbook - Page 23
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are active, fluid, and unfinalizable. I aspire to this de-centered, organic vitality and
continue to learn from Goldsworthy9s influence.
Andy Goldsworthy, Rivers and Tides Movie Clips, 2002
Andy Goldsworthy (born 1956) is a Scottish artist whose environmental
sculptures, earthworks, and photographs use interactions between space and
time, ephemeral materials, and the land. Goldsworthy's work challenges our
assumptions of art as an object by engaging the idea of "deliberate
impermanence" as part of many earthworks (Woods, 1999, p. 133). His
remarkable film Rivers and Tides (2002) shows that his artworks transition from
product to process, from being to becoming. Goldsworthy arranges natural
objects such as stones, branches, icicles, and leaves to co-create with time,
nature, the seasons, and transience. The world poetically transforms as art
intersects with life and the artist converses with the land. I have chosen two
Goldsworthy quotes that capture the movement of thought and the animation of
form that invigorate my narrative approach.
In the first quote, Goldsworthy writes, "When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is
not just that material itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and
around it. When I leave it, these processes continue" (The Art Story, n.d.).
Goldsworthy's art and words evoke the dynamic ripple effects that reach beyond
the temporal events of our narrative conversations.
In the second quote, Goldsworthy (2000) writes about his 1999 Nova Scotia
artwork:
I thought of the wind as a problem until I realized & the wind would take
the snow on a journey & It felt as though I was releasing the spirit from the
snow" (p. 110). Goldsworthy's art and language make me think of narrative
therapy's ideas of "migration," "transport," and "lines of flight." John
Winslade (2014) states that "& to have a sense of difference, & we need a
sense of movement & across territories of space and time (p. 2).
Breaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practices – Part Two
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2025 Release, p. 5-28.
www.journalnft.com
