As Millard Fillmore Elementary School's visual art teacher here in Moravia, I'm always looking for connections between my curriculum and the subjects students study in their classrooms. Over the last six or seven years, I have developed a learning experience for our sixth-grade students that connects their learning during their sixth-grade camping at Casowasco Conference Center on Owasco Lake in June with the work of a remarkable contemporary English artist named Andy Goldsworthy.

Goldsworthy works around the world creating installations, which are arrangements of objects or elements that are intentional, and sometimes, unconventional.

He is particularly well known for using only materials found in nature. Goldsworthy has worked with materials as temporal as wet flower petals, icicles and berries to make astonishingly beautiful artworks that he, then, photographs and publishes in books.

He never stops the natural disintegration of his work that occurs with weather or time. In Japan, he created a series of ice and snow installations that were so translucent that light shown through in intriguing patterns. Goldsworthy photographed these sculptures in the different light of early, mid and late day.

In another work, he carefully arranged leaves and berries on the surface of some water. He noted in his book that this piece was challenging because a fish kept nibbling at the berries he had so carefully placed!

Perhaps, you're wondering how this is art. Roger Took, director of Artangel Trust, is quoted in “Hand to Earth, Andy Goldsworthy” as saying: “Your work is a wonderful and beautiful and an admirable craft, it is also art because by its intervention in nature it creates new relationships between ourselves and nature.”

My goal was to give Millard Fillmore's sixth-graders an opportunity to experience that new, Andy Goldsworthy-type relationship with nature in the beautiful setting of Casowasco.

Students were introduced to Goldsworthy in art class. They had the opportunity to see images of his work, and began to consider what they might create at Casowasco. We discussed the way Goldsworthy chooses the site for his work, often waiting for weather conditions that will allow the water to reflect perfectly or the icicle to freeze in a particular way. Students' notions of “what is art?” were transformed, as they looked at photographs of Goldsworthy's arrangements of leaves, stones, ice and dirt.

Our first day at Casowasco began with team building experiences, led by their enthusiastic staff. After lunch, the students were gathered together to hear the assignment: to arrange natural, found materials from the surrounding area in an intentional way, based on the work of Goldsworthy.

Students went off, mostly in pairs, to begin to solve the assignment. Alan Mazzachi and Quinn Golden quickly found two trees that were growing close together and began their collaborative work. They used small sticks to begin to build a web-like structure. They selected only the smallest twigs, creating a web between the two trees. Alan stated, “This web is to represent how creative a spider can be and how people can do the same thing as animals, but in different ways like building things with hands.” Quinn noted, “Alan saw a spider on the tree, so we made it in that tree. We planned it out, and then we put all the sticks together in the arrow shapes. Andy Goldsworthy had good ideas in nature.”

Students were given cameras to photograph their installations. These photographs captured the variety of ideas they developed and became the focus of an Andy Goldsworthy display at our school.

Learning about this remarkable artist expanded our sixth-graders conception of art and empowered them to create their own art.

The next time you feel an urge to arrange those stones on the shores of Owasco Lake, or neatly weave those twigs, think of Goldsworthy.

Pat Kinney is an art teacher at Millard Fillmore Elementary School in Moravia.