Antony Gormley

My initial desire to research the works of Antony Gormley stemmed from my love for the casting community and searching for artists that are using similar mediums in the public eye of the contemporary art world. Wanting to work with the figure in a contemporary way Antony Gormley’s writings on the human body are an excellent recourse.

Antony Gormley understands the human body as a place of memory and transformation. Most of his early works are based on the process of casting his own body, which functions as subject, tool, and material. His more recent works deal with the body in abstracted or indirect ways and are concerned with the human condition. Making unexpected connections across ideas and disciplines, these works have moved the domain of figural sculpture beyond the confines of the physical body to include interaction with the surrounding world, whether that be the matrix of community, space and energy, memory, or built form.

I have been especially interested in one Gormley’s largest projects Inside Australia. The project consists 51 Insider sculptures installed over a 10-square-kilometere area on the dry bed of Lake Ballard in Western Australia. The sculptures are all made from digital scans made of people who lived in the town of Menzies, Western Australia. The figures were made into polystyrene forms, which in turn became sand molds into which molten stainless steel (with trace elements of minerals found in Lake Ballard) was poured. I specifically appreciate this project because of its use of technology as a tool to be used as a means to an end. The end result being a cast figure that is a inner-core or inner-life of a person from this desolate landscape.

I have many ideas of ways to work with the figure and though they are not completely related to Gormley’s ideas of the body as a vessel or the interior experience of the body; what he would call “the Insiders”, they are closely related in many ways. A lot of layers are occurring with my thoughts on figurative works: elements of nature, combined with the post-human body, and process, all being exposed to the viewer in a Zen-like experience. Gormley comments on similar topics in an interview: “There are two ways of connecting with the elemental and one is technological and the other biological, and I think they are both valid, and both necessary.” His work he says, calls upon the active participation of the viewer; it tries to allow things and materials that already exist to become eloquent rather than generating expressive forms in their own right.

Hutchinson, John. Antony Gormley (Contemporary Artists). New York: Phaidon, 2000. Print.

Gormely, Antony, Michael Mack, and Richard Noble. Antony Gormley. Go%u0308ttingen: SteidlMack, 2007. Print.

Jongh, Karlyn D. "Being the Void." Sculpture Mar. 2010: 27-31. Web.