Artists like Antony Gormley and the work they create intrigue me. I love large scale sculpture and art installations that allow the audience to immerse themselves the creations. Here are a few projects from Gormley that I found compelling. This is only a tiny sample of his work and you can learn and see much more on his website.
Expansion Field, 2015
Over the years, my obsession has been to try to explore the body as a place rather than simply as an object and to reconcile its space with space at large. I want to acknowledge that while we live within a built environment and we are the only animal to construct a habitat using Euclidean principles, the moment we close our eyes and become conscious of the darkness of the body, we are in an unbounded, ever extending space without dimension. This intimate zone of experience has the same unlimited properties as the sky at night.
With this EXPANSION FIELD, the cosmological constant of an expanding universe is applied to the subjective space of the body. The work is comprised of 60 boxes that evoke the unstable place of the body as an architectural field: 60 cases for darkness, or night, each derived from the volumes of my body but translated into the geometry of architecture.
Cloud Chain, 2012
CLOUD CHAIN attempts to integrate an artistic intervention with the function and material qualities of the building making a drawing in space that reinforces the experience of a succession of spatial encounters.
The sculpture is seen both from outside and within the building and works between the storage and access spaces. It is connected to the elements, the flooded inner courtyards and the changing conditions of light and sky.
CLOUD CHAIN is catalytic in the way that it uses space, attempting to activate rather than occupy it.
Waste Man, 2006
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.
Household waste and furniture 19.2 x 4.6 x 2.7 m
Angel of the North, 1998
Is it possible to make a work with purpose in a time that demands doubt? I wanted to make an object that would be a focus of hope at a painful time of transition for the people of the north-east, abandoned in the gap between the industrial and the information ages.
The work is made of corten steel, weighs 200 tonnes and has 500 tonnes of concrete foundations. The mound near the A1 motorway which was the designated site of the sculpture was made after the closure of the Lower Tyne Colliery, out of the destroyed remains of the pithead baths. It is a tumulus marking the end of the era of coal mining in Britain.
artist & website: Antony Gormley – http://www.antonygormley.com/
