Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. Upon completing a degree in archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to India, returning to London three years later to study at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art.
Over the last 25 years Antony Gormley has revitalised the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material. Since 1990 he has expanded his concern with the human condition to explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other in large-scale installations like Allotment, Critical Mass, Another Place, Domain Field, Inside Australia and most recently Blind Light.
Antony Gormley’s work has been exhibited extensively, with solo shows throughout the UK in venues such as the Whitechapel, Tate and Hayward Galleries, the British Museum and White Cube, and internationally at museums including the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, and the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Germany. Blind Light, a major show of his work, was held at the Hayward Gallery from 17 May until 19 August 2007.
He has participated in major group shows such as the Venice Biennale and the Kassel Documenta 8. His Field has toured America, Europe and Asia. Angel of the North and, most recently, Quantum Cloud on the Thames in Greenwich are amongst the most celebrated examples of contemporary British sculpture. One of his key installations, Another Place, is to remain permanently on display at Crosby Beach, Merseyside.
He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997. In 2007 he was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Trinity College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and has been a Royal Academician since 2003.
Waste Man was made over a six-week period at the end of summer 2006 out of about 30 tonnes of waste materials that had been gathered by the Thanet waste disposal services and by local people, and deposited in Dreamland, the area of Margate next to the sea and close to the station that had traditionally been the site of a vast funfair.
Some works are made in wax to be cast in bronze; this was made in domestic waste to be cast in fire.
For me this work was a collective body (similar to Havmann or the Angel of the North) made from the raw materials of people’s home lives – beds, tables, dining chairs, toilet seats, desks, pianos and rubbish (all the limiting baggage of the householder), transformed into energy.
The work plays a part in Penny Woolcock’s Margate Exodus, a re-telling of the Bible story of the enslavement and liberation of the Jewish people. For Penny Woolcock this sculpture was an image of the burning bush that gave Moses his mission. For me it was more a sign of those who had been dispossessed or refused a place, standing up defiantly to be recognised.
The piece burnt in 32 minutes, sending showers of sparks over the crowd of spectators.
From the beginning I was trying to make something as direct as possible with clay: the earth.
I wanted to work with people and to make a work about our collective future and our responsibility for it. I wanted the art to look back at us, its makers (and later viewers), as if we were responsible - responsible for the world that it (the work Field) and we were in. I have made it with help five times in different parts of the world.
The most recent is from Guangzhou, China, and was exhibited in Guangzhou, Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing in 2003. It's made from one hundred and twenty-five tons of clay energised by fire, sensitised by touch and made conscious by being given eyes.
The 200,000 body-surrogates completely occupy the space in which they are installed, taking the form of the building and excluding us, but allowing visual access.
It is always seen from a single threshold. The dimensions of the viewing area are equivalent to no less than one sixth of the total floor area of the piece. This viewing area is completely empty.
The viewer then mediates between the occupied and unoccupied areas of a given building. I like the idea of the physical area occupied being put at the service of the imaginative space of the witness.
Makers' Instructions
I gave these instructions to the makers:
Take a hand-size ball of clay, form it between the hands, into a body surrogate as quickly as possible. Place it at arm's length in front of you and give it eyes.
It was important that it was through the repeated action of touching, forming, placing apart from the body and making conscious, that each person found their own form. The extraordinary thing was the distinctiveness of the forms that were found.
To install a hundred solid cast iron bodyforms along the coast to the west and south of the Kugelbake. The work will occupy an area of 1.75 square kilometers, with the pieces placed between 50 and 250 meters apart along the tideline and one kilometer out towards the horizon, to which they will all be facing. Depending on the fall of the land, the state of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of day the work will be more or less visible. The sculptures will be installed on a level plane attached to two-meter vertical steel piles. The ones closest to the horizon will stand on the sand, those nearer the shore being progressively buried. At high water, the sculptures that are completely visible when the tide is out will be standing up to their necks in water.
The sculptures are made from seventeen body-casts taken from my body (protected by a thin layer of wrapping plastic) between the 19th of May and the 10th of July. The sculptures are all standing in a similar way, with the lungs more or less inflated and their postures carrying different degrees of tension or relaxation.
Great thread Strawberry!
Follow on from Another Place: Statues by Anthony Gormley that were dotted around the South Bank in London to promote an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 2007.
{tdrury @ flickr}
Last edited by Diamond Star : 15-03-2008 at 05:16 PM.
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