PASSAGE

Stones, icicles, leaves, branches, grass—such are the media of England-born, Scotland-based artist Goldsworthy, who creates simple, striking and evanescent sculptures on beaches, rocks and forest floors: small shards of ice that he freezes onto stones, leaves he layers over the trunk of a dead elm. In more than 200 color photographs, Goldsworthy documents his works and their subsequent transformations as the leaves brown and the icicles melt, revealing as his subject the relationship between nature and time. Unlike the works by a previous generation of earth artists, such as Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, Goldsworthy's pieces have immediately connected with a larger public, as the success of his many books (Time ; Hand to Earth ; etc) suggests. In an essay (originally published in the New Yorker ) about Goldsworthy's "Garden of Stones," commissioned by the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Simon Schama declares that Goldsworthy is not the "placid pastoralist" that some of his critiques would suggest, but "a dramaturge of nature's temper, often fickle, often foul." Other projects highlighted here include "Three Cairns," stone structures that Goldsworthy built and photographed in California, New York and Iowa, and "Moonlit Path," a winding trail of pulverized chalk that glows hauntingly in a West Sussex forest. Goldsworthy fans will relish the photos, as well as the artist's accompanying notes: "I have to start with a strong idea but with an open mind about how best that idea can be realized." (Nov.)