ARTIST RESEARCH Antony Gormley

Rationale
Antony Gormley's portayal of the human figure has been a key inspiration to my usage of the human form across all of my studio areas in 2016. Through casting of his own body he produces human figures, but instead of producing works that are realistic he reduces the form. Exploring the internal and external spaces of the self. I was drawn to the work 'The Angel of the North' due to its title, use of the human form, and that it was an outdoor installation. It was originally apart of my research into artworks that used religious connotations. 

Sir Antony Gormley - The Angel of the North

According to Gormley, the significance of an angel was three-fold: first, to signify that beneath the site of its construction, coal miners worked for two centuries; second, to grasp the transition from an industrial to an information age, and third, to serve as a focus for our evolving hopes and fears

.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.