Sunday, 28 April 2013

Research // Antony Gormley


Antony Gormley, is a British sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in the North of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998.


Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside." His work attempts to treat the body not as an object but a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical – a trace of a real event of a real body in time.


Gormley's Event Horizon, consisting of 31 life-size and anatomically-correct casts of his body, four in cast iron and 27 in fiberglass, was installed on top of prominent buildings along London's South Bank, and installed in locations around New York City's Madison Square in 2010. Gormley said of the New York site that "Within the condensed environment of Manhattan's topography, the level of tension between the palpable, the perceivable and the imaginable is heightened because of the density and scale of the buildings" and that in this context, the project should "activate the skyline in order to encourage people to look around. In this process of looking and finding, or looking and seeking, one perhaps re-assess one's own position in the world and becomes aware of one's status of embedment.



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I admire his work and the messages he's trying to get out through it. I like how he uses the human body and am thinking of incorporating this into my own work in some form of installation. No set ideas yet though. 

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