Environmental sculptor Andy Goldsworthy will present a public lecture "Rivers and Tides: Andy Goldsworthy Working with Time," Wednesday, Dec. 4 , at 7:30 p.m. in the David Call Alumni Auditorium of Kennedy Hall on the Cornell University campus.

The lecture will include a screening of Goldsworthy's film by the same name, and a question and answer session with audience members will follow. The event is free and open to the public. However, tickets are required with a limit of two per person. Tickets will be available starting Monday, Dec. 2, at the Willard Straight Hall ticket office, on campus, and at the Clinton House box office in downtown Ithaca.

Goldsworthy, an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell, is a British environmental sculptor whose art is characterized by spare, simple shapes arranged from natural materials such as leaves, stones, water, or sticks. Preferring to create his art in privacy rather than staging a public performance, Goldsworthy is known for creating sculptures of extraordinary beauty and then photographing his works before they decay or are dismantled. The artist, who lives in Scotland, has created site installations in Britain, Japan, Alaska and Ithaca, among other places. Most of his works, aside from his stone walls, are ephemeral; addressing issues of growth and decay, seasonal cycles and the idea that an artwork, too, has a naturally limited life span.

Goldsworthy has authored several popular coffee table-sized photography books that chronicle his work, including: Time ,A Collaboration with Nature , andStone .

In October 1999, with sponsorship from Cornell's Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Goldsworthy worked in the Fall Creek gorge on Cornell's campus and presented the Georges Lurcy Charitable and Educational Trust lecture. In March 2000, he returned to Cornell to create an installation piece in the Johnson Museum that included an exhibition of the photographs of the outdoor pieces he created the previous October.

To view Goldsworthy's work, visit: http://www.hainesgallery.com/AG.work.html . For more information about Goldsworthy's visit, contact Gerri Jones at the A.D. White Professors-at-Large office, (607) 255-0832, or e-mail her gaj1@cornell.edu .