Antony Gormley: Sculpted space, within and without

Summary

Sculptor Antony Gormley argues that sculpture is not primarily about making objects or figures, but about creating an awareness of space—both the inner, subjective space of the body and the outer space of the world.

He connects this idea to a childhood memory of lying still in a small room. With time, its darkness seemed to expand, becoming a space for imagination and possibility. He invites the audience to briefly close their eyes and notice this shared, inward experience.

Gormley describes several ways his work makes space perceptible:

• Marking human presence in a landscape: On a dry lake bed, he threw a hand-sized stone about 22 metres, cleared the stones within that radius into a pile, then stood on the pile and threw them outward again. The subtle rearrangement records a human action among rocks shaped by geological time, encouraging viewers to see the landscape anew.
• Using the body as a mould or boundary: In his studio, others mould his body while he stands with his eyes closed. He treats the resulting forms as records of a lived bodily moment and explores the void inside a bodily outline, sometimes enclosing it with a lead shell.
• Reimagining the body as energy or a field: Rather than depicting a conventional standing figure, some works evoke the body as a centre of energy or as a presence within a larger space.
• Putting bodily memory against the horizon: In a large installation at the mouth of the Mersey, repeated body forms are spread across an area of sea. They appear and disappear with changing conditions, setting human presence and industrial time against tides, distance and the horizon.
• Transferring the body into architecture: Room for the Great Australian Desert is a thick, hollow concrete structure based on the minimum space a crouching body occupies. Set against a flat horizon, it uses architectural enclosure as a metaphor for the body and for questions about humanity’s place in time and space.
• Using light and mist to alter perception: In Blind Light, a brightly lit chamber filled with water vapour makes visitors lose sight of their own bodies and of others. People emerge from the mist as partial, shifting figures, so viewers become objects of one another’s attention.

Across these works, Gormley treats art as a way to renew firsthand experience in the present, rather than as an object of monetary value. He suggests that art can open our eyes to the fact that we are already within the changing moment we seek to understand.

Creators and Contributors Mentioned

• Antony Gormley — speaker and sculptor
• Joseph Geni — translator credited in the subtitles
• Morton Bast — reviewer credited in the subtitles
• Chris — colleague referenced by Gormley; surname not given
• John Cage — artist quoted by Gormley