“If he is not to die,” Marx wrote, humanity “must maintain a continuous dialogue with nature.”

Over 50 years, Andy Goldsworthy has mediated between environment and people, a relationship disrupted and all but dismantled by the emergence of private property and commodity production enforced by the enclosing of land. The violent uprooting of people from the countryside consigned the masses to urban squalor and atomisation. It severed their connection with the “original source of wealth – the soil.” Goldsworthy’s work can be seen as a lifelong attempt to retrieve what was lost.

In the absence of a Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes famously warned against an anomic “state of nature” where life for the many was “nasty, brutish and short.” In contrast, we might see Goldsworthy’s work as a cautionary reminder of what happens when we are disconnected from the earth by a system which knows the price of everything – including a commodified nature – and the value of nothing.

It is nature that makes us whole. It solders our collective spirit to our origins as a species. Instead of protecting us from ourselves, the modern state ushered in a long period of alienation from the wellsprings of life.

Goldsworthy’s depictions render nature alien and haunted. In his earlier work, he appears as an apparition, a lone savage abroad in a sci-fi landscape. Videos capture hands lathering blackberry juice and naked feet picking their way through jagged ice. A river runs red, bleeding into moving waters from a varnished stone.

In Hitting Water, he fashions a rainbow from violent blows. In Morecambe Bay, he prowls black sands like a lost invader at the peripheries of our shared memory.

At moments, Goldsworthy’s work is a powerful celebration of a strange and untamed land. At others, his images evoke a folk horror at an environment that has become so distant to many of us as to become foreign and foreboding.

Goldsworthy makes Hitchcockian cameos throughout his work. At times disembodied limbs are captured in dreamlike footage. Elsewhere, his presence maps out a curious tattoo against endless space and settings grown unfamiliar to urban perceptions.  

This is art found not from urban waste, but nature’s detritus. The stairway into the main exhibition is draped in wool cuttings mottled with coloured dye. We are met with a wall of barbed wire, an imposing impasse we are obliged to navigate our way around. A carpet of gravel stones from a Dumfries and Galloway graveyard fill a room.

In Old Passage, visitors walk a gauntlet of fallen branches coiled into twisting sentries. Goldsworthy’s work feels transported whole, in the raw and without the sanitising process of a monetising conversion.

Barbed wire is a recurring motif. We are reminded of nature’s ghostly beauty, of the forest as the scene of our darkest imaginings from children’s stories.

Goldsworthy invites us to reconnect with a lost landscape. But his images evoke dreams and memories that caution as well as seduce. These aren’t green and pleasant idylls to escape to for a weekend away from the maddening crowd. If we are to reclaim our relationship to nature, the negotiations will necessarily involve a wary respect.

I confess to never having come across Goldsworthy’s work before. But in curating 50 years of “connection, not division,” we are presented with a melancholy, strange and sometimes unsettling reminder of what “private property and money” have done so much to debase – a love and connectivity to a natural world which, if the planet is not to outlive us, must be restored.

Andy Goldsworthy Fifty Years runs at the National Galleries of Scotland until November 2. For more information see: nationalgalleries.org