Rivers and Tides

• "Rivers and Tides"
• Andy Goldsworthy
• Anyone who has built a sand castle by the edge of the sea and paused to observe the rising tide creep in and wash it away, can sink into the contemplative world of the Scottish artist profiled in Thomas Riedelsheimer's film ''Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working With Time.''

  This bearded, soft-spoken 46-year-old dreamer, who shares an old stone house with his wife and four children in a rural village, Penpont, works mostly outdoors, creating mutable sculptures that he calls earthworks. These organic sculptures interact with nature in a way that magically illuminates the cycles of creation, destruction and renewal.

  Although some of his work, like a winding stone wall that he built at the Storm King Arts Center in Mountainville, N.Y., has longevity, most of it involves ice, water, leaves, grass, mud and stones and is not built to last: its evanescence is an essential aspect of its beauty. But thanks to photography and to movies like this, it can live on.

  Mr. Goldsworthy documents his projects in photographs that are exhibited in galleries and published in art books like ''Hand to Earth: Andy Goldsworthy Sculpture 1976-1990'' (Harry N. Abrams). But Mr. Reidelshheimer's film lends it an immediacy that still photographs can only begin to suggest.
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• Andy Goldsworthy OBE is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland.

Andy Goldsworthy's art is supposed to fall apart. He creates large-scale outdoor sculptures and artworks out of natural materials like mud, wood, ice and stone in an attempt to imbue the physical world with a spiritual, ephemeral element. Director Thomas Riedelsheimer follows Goldsworthy as he constructs his art everywhere from upstate New York to his home village in Scotland, and questions the solitary artist about his inspirations, frustrations and artistic goals.

Points

            All like destruction

            Working with time

            Understand the Changes

            Color is expression of life