Andy Goldsworthy, who, along with Richard Long, was one of the founding fathers of the British landscape art tradition, looks like he could use a shower. He has got dirt lodged under his chipped fingernails and his disheveled gray hair seems to have been styled by a sweaty hat. A blue tattoo on his forearm peeks out from his threadbare fleece, a reminder of a physical life that has included laboring, gardening and farming.

But there is nothing roughshod about Goldsworthy’s personality or his art. He is a gentle, soft-spoken man, careful and articulate with his words. Similarly, his fragile and transient art often speaks with a quiet insistence.

Most of the time, Goldsworthy ventures into the fields and forests near his Scottish home with no plans. Using only his hands and whatever nature might offer on that day — berries, thorns, reeds — he assembles delicate structures and executes subtle transformations that may only last a moment. He creates spiraling frozen filigrees by spit-welding icicles around a tree. He arranges rocks on a mountain-side scree pile so that a tortuous path is revealed only at a certain light-reflecting hour each day. And he meticulously slathers a scarlet sand-paste over every inch of a dead, craggy tree until it is blooming with new life.

He insists that he is not a nature artist, for he is preoccupied not so much with unsullied natural beauty as he is the interaction of man with the landscape. In his rain and frost shadow pieces, Goldsworthy literally imprints himself upon the landscape.

His new Stanford sculpture, “Stone River,” is an anomaly in his oeuvre, both in terms of the larger scale and the degree of permanence. Sitting discreetly in a depression in front of Cantor Arts Center, “Stone River” is a golden sandstone wall that winds and tapers from one edge of the bowl to the other. The building stones, taken from decimated campus buildings after the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes, are seamlessly crafted into the form, and evoke the stolid engineering structures that man, time and time again, erects on the landscape. The serpentine fluidity of the form, however, evokes the inexorable natural processes — time, earthquakes — that will eventually consume all of Stanford’s buildings. Is it the foundation for a new building, rising from the earth? Or are the stones the sole remains of a ruined civilization? Like an archaeological dig, “Stone River” sits at the intersection of deep time and constructed history.

On the eve of the sculpture’s inauguration last week, Intermission spoke with Goldsworthy directly about “Stone River,” as well his other projects.

Intermission: Stanford has what’s called “The Bone-yard,” with all the sandstone and marble [building stones]. Did you travel to the Bone-yard and pick out the sandstone?

Goldsworthy: When I first came, I proposed the form. Then I was told about the Bone-yard. The idea of stone that was once used for building — that is now being returned back into the ground, into the earth. For a work that is about flow, movement and change, it was perfect. It had this human element.

And the reason why I put it below ground was to weld it to the earth, and to give a feeling that you’ve just scraped away one small portion of something that may be much, much larger.

I: The serpentine form, is that from water, from a river?

G: I call it a river, but it’s not a river. There are rivers of wind, rivers of rain, rivers of birds. It’s more about flow. I think that’s what the form is about: extracting a sense of movement in the materials.

I: So many of your works are ephemeral. Why is that?

G: I think when I first began working, it was about the moment. The moment in which I made the piece was the most important thing. Then I realized you had to consider what has gone before. You have to understand the history behind that moment to understand the stone, the life of the stone, the journey the stone has made.

And then I also try to understand and deal with the future. Not to control it, but to make work that will become active or have a life in the future.

I: So some of your works are starting to deal with time outside of your life-time?

G: I’ve become aware that the place I work has been made rich by the people that have worked the landscape. And you feel layer upon layer of people. There is a strong social nature to my work that is not really understood. And the British landscape has taught me that —and that I am the next layer.

I: Were you a madman on the beach growing up, building things?

G: I think I had a normal childhood . . . but art has been the only thing I could do. Memories of building dams in the woods — sure, those are important to me. But it was with farming that the sculptural possibilities of the landscape were made strong: the stacking of hay, plowing a field, laying a hedge, building a wall — all very sculptural. And that informed me, I think.

I: Did you always photograph your works?

G: I began working as a student in art school. I had to explain to my lecturers what I was doing, so I’d show them my photographs. It’s an explanation. Like Brancusi said, ‘It’s like [the sculptures] talking.’

I: Do you view photography as merely documentary or do you try to enliven your works in some way?

G: I’d say enliven is the wrong word. Photography is a way of exploring and articulating some of the ideas and feelings I have about it. Like what I’ve been doing today — [“Stone River”] is a piece that can be seen only through a whole day photographing it.

The reason is that a sculpture isn’t just about the stuff it’s made of. It’s about space, light and time. And that sculptures sometimes sleep and sometimes wake up. They have a life. And photography is a wonderful way of exploring and articulating that life.

If I’m working with a leaf, it’s the growth I’m trying to understand. If a stone, I’m trying to understand the energies and processes in the stone. I want to understand the flesh as well as the bone.

I: What’s the most enjoyable part of the process?

G: There are moments of such pleasure and beauty that it takes your breath away. But that’s underwritten by so much that doesn’t work, painfully collapses, blew away on the brink of finishing the piece. So the work is very much tied to fragility and pain. And loss. I feel a sense of loss when a sculpture collapses before its time.

I: You work on your neighbors’ lands. How do they feel about it?

G: In some ways it’s kind of difficult to work on other peoples’ lands. But in another way it’s very good for me. It would be very easy for me to buy my own farm. But that would forfeit this social dimension of the landscape. That, at any moment, someone could come across me and want to know what I’m doing, and talk about what I’m doing. That is irritating at times, but in the bigger picture it’s very important to have that.

And in Britain we have public rights-of-way, so everybody has access to the landscape. And that’s one thing I miss here in America. Here you have to go to state parks, national parks, get in the car and drive. I like to work within walking distance of where I’m staying. I think everybody should be able to do that, no matter where they live. That’s not just an anti-car stance, it’s just a much better way to engage the landscape. It means you’re going over the same ground time and time again. It’s your home ground. And home ground is very important to me — this is why I feel like the reluctant traveler. When I’m away from home, I’m missing amazing events. Always. When I leave home, I hate it when [my wife] tells me it has snowed at home. It hurts! You wouldn’t believe how it hurts.

For an artist whose art is about change, I thought that change was best understood by staying in the same place.

I: Not sudden, catastrophic change?

G: When you travel you see differences, not change. Just like here, I stayed and watched the sculpture for the whole day. I saw incredible changes, really important changes. The inauguration of the sculpture is this afternoon and it will break that day — and [whispering] I’m really annoyed!

I can tolerate it, but I feel as if that commitment to the piece is broken and I will have not learnt the whole day; there will be a gap in my understanding of this piece.

I: Do you see a difference in America in that here, so much of the landscape is marked by mechanized farming? And that there are completely wild spaces?

G: I think in America, there is a tendency for a division between wild space and non-wild spaces, there’s a tension there which doesn’t exist in Britain, because everywhere in Britain, people have worked. The whole of Britain is one sculpture or one earthwork. It has been sculpted and painted by the activity of farmers. There’s more a sense of integration with the land.

Wilderness is more difficult for me to deal with because I feel that maybe I should just leave it as it is. I’m not drawn to being the first person or only person in a place. I went to the North Pole as a kind of exception to the things I do. The idea of going to the origin of winter — I love winter — was too strong. If I could go to the origin of autumn or summer I would, but it’s only with winter that you can go to that point.

I: So much of your work is self-effacing. Not modest in the sense that the work itself is modest, but un-egotistical. How do you feel about all this fame and success thrust upon you?

G: What fame? There’s no fame. No one recognizes me. It’s not there; it doesn’t exist.

I: Well, we’ll see if the auditorium is full tomorrow night.

G: That’s one of the reasons I give talks — I don’t enjoy giving public lectures — but sometimes it’s necessary to deflate things. When people don’t seem to realize it’s just me.