Another piece of Andy's, created in a different location of Storm King Art Center (built ten years later than the original more famous curvy wall ) is a somewhat shorter meandering wall, this time winding its way around huge boulders instead of trees. It's called 'Five Men Seventeen Days Fifteen Boulders One Wall'
The two walls, both inspiring examples of the same continuing theme of Goldsworthy's, reinforce the sense of appreciation and understanding he has for this fundamentally natural flowing shape.
The movie 'Rivers and Tides' shows more of his investigation into winding river shapes in nature.
Many of his other works too, explore this hauntingly familiar serpentine curve found in plants and animals and in a myriad of other geological and geophysical formations.
The connection to the basic building block of all living things, the DNA molecule comes to mind too.
The mystical looping Ayahuasca snake pattern described by the Peruvian Shamen, the iconic symbol for medicine, even the elongated meandering of the spiral path of the orbits of the planets, as they speed though the universe – these all trace a basic shape that we recognize in its more familiar manifestations.
Are we drawn to this primitive meandering shape for a reason. Is there something more subconscious going on?
It is the antithesis to the straight line and to the sterile lifeless calculations of Euclidian geometry. It is the line of life. It defies clinical systemization.
Life follows an elusive wavy path of growth. It can not be delineated or outlined in any rule books. To try to standardize or straighten it, or fit it into a fixed shape is to lose the flow, to lose the meaning and to damn the river
