Andy Goldsworthy’s work has a transience running  through its core. Such quiet transience is perhaps best expressed in his use of ice within sculpture. Though almost everything the artist does has a brief lifespan as a finished object, there are few that seem so precarious as his ice works, specifically the various ice arches that he laboured on throughout the 1980s.

For this article, the ice arch of focus is to be the one produced in Cumbria in 1982, one of the best that is captured in the photography of his many momentary visions. The process for Goldsworthy in general seems quite simple on paper though clearly incredibly difficult in reality; wandering into a landscape and looking for raw materials to use in the creation of some sort of ritualistic building.

The ice sculptures mix the preciousness of Goldsworthy’s similarly constructed arches made of stone with a definitive period of finishing time, one he is held to both by the time needed for each individual slat of sculpture to melt and form with one another, and the subsequent time with which the piece invariably melts overall.

In Goldsworthy’s diary, he recalls how fleeting his initial (and perhaps most beautiful) sculpture was, made even more evocative by the sun’s rays shining through it.  ‘In the afternoon went back,’ he wrote, ‘down where made arch out of ice – larger arch – very beautiful – sun hitting it – but only for short while – made it in white shadow of wood.’ There is a melancholy to this description that belies Goldsworthy’s quiet frustration at the unavoidably fleeting nature of his work.  But there is also a subtle, textural element to his description, one that reflects upon the strangeness of working with water but in a solid form.

He calls his ice the ‘white shadow of wood’; something not as rigid or as pliable as the various parts of a tree but something that feels almost like a ghost-image of a living thing. It may be possible to read Goldsworthy’s role in this instance as a summoner of some quiet spirit that must always inevitably fall back into the other side of life; the constantly commutable substance, dripping down into an invisible, macro underworld beyond.

Goldsworthy is famous for many moments of discussion involving the transience of his work and specifically how that transience reflects the likeness between his sculptures and natural life cycles. He is on record suggesting that ‘Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.’ There is no better summation of the ice sculpture than by Goldsworthy himself in this regard.

The process of decay in this work is explicitly built in, almost toyed with by the artist as he attempts to build his bridge to nowhere and. This is not simply because the arch’s actual design automatically seems so precious but because it clearly resists Goldsworthy’s building of it from the off; where the material, like in so many of his works, actively defies the process which the artist is putting it through.

In his diary, Goldsworthy writes of returning to the arch the next day and is jubilantly surprised at its clinging onto existence. It is at this point where he removed the stone supports from underneath, allowing the arch to stand for itself:

Overnight – wind – overcast went to arch – early – still there!!
But melting quickly.
Lifted out supports – very
easy!
Very beautiful.
– A melting 
ice arch. (1982)

It is difficult to pinpoint what specifically the artist is referring to as beautiful here but, from the framing of the diary, it appears to be the slow destruction of the arch more than anything else; at least in the context of its initial success in being able to stand on its own. Perhaps the artist would have been less joyous at its impending melting if the arch had simply collapsed once the support stones had been removed. He did, after all, have four attempts at making this particular arch though whether the other three succeeded with the same feeling for the artist is unknown.

Goldsworthy has written of a desire to get beneath his materials in both a physical and metaphysical way. He wrote that ‘As with all my work, whether it’s a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I’m trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things.’  The ice arch is the epitome of this in that inevitability hangs heavily over it, at a design and a material level, meaning that the very act of making it instantly questions more than just the appearance of the ice itself. Like so much of his work, there is a temptation to read much about life into its natural decay but the ice arch seems more about going against the inevitable ending everyone shares, striving on simply for the sake of one fleeting, beautiful moment.

Glimmering light, solid water,

Drips slowly onto icy grass.

I long to walk under and over the arch,

But fear its translucence,

Not its falling.

Sharp shards fade into the dusk,

Behind a black forest of a winter.

The melting of dusks and dawns,

Away like the ground before,

The stone after,

The water now.

The stone – white shadow-wood – melts together.

Frozen and fleeting.

I desire that moment before the dawn,

But fear my bones are lost, 

Like daytime ice.