A documentary by Thomas Riedelsheimer. Rated PG

What immediately grabs you about Andy Goldsworthy’s work is its simplicity. Unlike most conceptual artists, the northern-England-born sculptor, photographer, and unintended naturalist retains a childlike attitude to earth-shaping projects that can be as massive as recurving an old-growth tree or as unassuming as a stripe of coloured leaves on a rainy walkway.

Some of his momentary impositions, like dyed icicles or white powder shaken from leaves, are so ephemeral, he may be the only person who sees them in real life. At one point, he and his grown daughter Holly lay out a huge white canvas to register the hoofprints of local sheep. Other projects involve laboriously mounted stone archways or cryptlike structures that mimic primitive and fairly permanent building patterns in the parts of Scotland he has explored thoroughly for more than four decades. Documenting his process has become part and parcel of the art, something explicated and, obviously, abetted by German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer, who here presents a stand-alone sequel to his award-winning profile Rivers and Tides, from 2001.

Again using nature sounds and a superb score from guitarist Fred Frith (the perfectly complemen-tary music ranges from medieval mystery to free-jazz abstraction and enigmatic minimalism), Leaning Into the Wind lets Goldsworthy be Goldsworthy, with no experts or colleagues to contextualize his stuff. Good thing he’s such a likable, no-bullshit fellow, then, although when we first meet him, in rural Brazil, he is fascinated to learn from a poor farm wife how she made her Gaudí-like floors from white clay and cow dung.

We also follow the grey-haired innovator, here still a boyish 60, to Spain, southern France, and other climes, the better for him to keep discovering new materials. In the end, though, his main substance is himself, as he climbs through bushes and faces down a winter windstorm in the Highlands, as the title suggests. Frequently, he reclines on cobblestones to feel urban vibrations or just to see the outline he leaves on a rainy street. His goal—one sure to inspire similar impulses in viewers after a quietly transporting 90 minutes—seems to be measuring the outline of humanity in the world, and to do so without colonizing it.