As the creator of the world’s largest angel, Sir Antony Gormley, 75, needs no introduction, especially when it comes to two main groups of people: first, those who love art; and second, those who live in or have travelled through Northeast England. After all, his seminal Angel of the North is unmissable — a monumental 20m tall, 200-tonne steel and concrete sculpture with the wingspan of a commercial jet. Overlooking the A1 motorway near Gateshead in Tyne and Wear, it stands sentinel-like, watching over the region.
GO EAST, YOUNG MAN
The Angel’s ultimate location — on the site of an old coal mine — was key to Gormley agreeing to take the project on.
“I wanted to make something that would be a focus of hope at a painful time of transition for the people of the Northeast, abandoned in the gap between the industrial and the information ages,” he said during a visit to Kuala Lumpur recently.
Reluctant to discuss artistic interpretations, Gormley says, “[Angel of the North] should mean whatever you want it to. I am not in favour of over-determining work that the viewer has to do.”
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Raised Catholic, he acknowledges “the idea [of a guardian angel] is important to me and is, in some sense, an example of a collective archetype. As humans, many of us need to believe that there is this connection between the palpable and the imaginable… something that connects the physical with the immaterial. At the same time, you could say that the Angel of the North is a complete paradox: 200 tonnes of metal representing a supposedly weightless spiritual being. But it was imperative that this angel would never fly, hence my rooting it with 25m-deep piles beneath its feet to forever share its cusp of the hill — a tumulus made up of the remains of 250 years of mining — with the people who come to visit.”
The Angel of the North is seen by millions annually due to its proximity to the Great North Road or the A1, which links London, the capital of England, with Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland
This decision was based on the most human of sensations: the ability to be impacted by emotion. “It was profoundly moving to have been able to work with a community that, in a sense, was told it had no more future as the era of coal-mining was over,” Gormley says.
“Equally, all of the shipyards around were told the same thing. It was as if these communities, built up over 300 years, had no more place in the present. You must remember, at that time, many of the ships, trains, bridges and early houses exported to Australia were cast using coal from the mines and ore from the quarries of England’s northeast. So, I asked myself an anthropological question: Is it possible to make a work that — without being about the reinforcement of hierarchy and traditions of power — actually expresses the past and tells the story of a community made out of the relationship between coal, iron and engineering?”
When Angel of the North was erected over the weekend of Feb 14, 1998, thousands of cheering onlookers were reported to have lined the route as a convoy of trucks slowly but surely transported its torso and wings to the site. Now one of North England’s most famous landmarks, not to mention a much-beloved public art piece, Angel of the North also, unwittingly, serves as a place of memory, says Gormley. “I hear of people bringing tributes to loved ones and tying them to nearby trees. This is interesting to me, as the very act of doing so seems to fulfil certain memorial and ancestral functions that run deep in the human psyche. At the same time, these actions serve the message that ‘we are here still’.
“And when you stand beneath the Angel’s wings, look to the south, feel the wind in your hair and on your face, there is something that reinforces you and your being,” Gormley goes on to say. “I guess that has always been me wanting the viewer to also be the subject of the work. The art has never been just about representation but also what the viewer can do with it, using their own experiences through the agency of the work. That, in the end, is the power of sculpture.”
AN OFFERING TO NATURE
Closer to home, and currently being fabricated, is Elemental, a reclining figure composed of a series of rectangular box shapes, on Bigeum Island in Shinan Province, South Korea. Said to be Gormley’s largest work to date, it measures approximately 110m long, 23m high and 18m deep, and sits in a relatively shallow part of a pristine bay surrounded by islands.
“We are literally growing it on the sand, on Bigeum-do’s Wonpyeong Beach. It is indeed the biggest project I have ever been involved in and it is a wonderful thing to be making it in South Korea, with the Korean people,” he says.
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Once ready, art lovers will undoubtedly travel in droves to Bigeum-do. Although remote, it was featured in television drama Spring Waltz, while nature enthusiasts already know of the island, which has been designated as part of Dadohae Marine National Park and is itself a Unesco Biosphere Reserve. The archipelago is also a bastion of agricultural and traditional culture. Local farmers plant rice, barley, sweet potatoes and a highly regarded coastal variety of sweet spinach called seomcho, while Bigeum-do salt is particularly prized. And it is this salt that served as inspiration for Elemental.
“The work, in a sense, takes its form from the quadrilateral formation of salt crystals,” Gormley says. In totality, however, the artwork will resemble a recumbent figure, which the religious would inevitably link to a reclining Buddha. “I did think of it as the parinirvana of Buddha, yes, offering his body back to the elements while resting on a tidal plane and interacting with its natural environment, from the shifting light to the rising tides, changing weather and eventual colonisation by marine life. This reflects how the permanent state of all matter is transitional, transformational… changing. And I felt it necessary in a time of climate emergency,” he adds gravely. “The work is simply a catalyst for us to feel and take note of our relationship to the sea, sky, land and the earth.”
The approach, the journey from Seoul all the way to Bigeum-do, is as important to Gormley as the perception of Elemental itself. Not unlike a pilgrimage, there is a palpable sense of spirituality — or at least to move forward with intention — as well as the possible enjoyment of a dialogue with land and sea, capturing perfectly the nuances of permanence, impermanence, fluidity and the elements. “The important thing is that the work is rooted in its place. It is not going anywhere, so people have to go to it. If you wish to see the work, you will likely come from Seoul, after which another four hours train travel is needed to get to Mokpo, followed by a ferry ride of 40-45 minutes and then proceeding by car or bicycle or whatever. After another hour or so, you will be deposited and invited to walk through a relatively wild forest for another half hour before finally reaching it.”
The work itself is state-of-the-art, comprising 456 beam elements ranging in section sizes from 190mm sq to nearly 300mm sq. “This is the section size that reflects the light and the thing that excited me most,” Gormley adds. “The frames are special stainless steel that are not polished and very light sensitive. So whatever the conditions of the atmosphere, it will react — be it mist, bright sunlight or moonlight… whatever ambient light there is.”
Elemental will eventually share itself with the marine creatures that will cling to it in time, and all of the fishing buoys that come across the sea from China. “Being in the Yellow Sea, a lot of fishing goes on and most people use these very colourful plastic floats for their nets, which wash up on the beach regularly. We do our best to clear them but eventually, they will also be part of the context of the work.”
Having first visited Bigeum-do three years ago, it might surprise people to learn that Gormley has returned to the site only once since. “After, I work from topographical maps and then from satellite imagery, which is incredibly useful but, of course, there is nothing like being there and seeing the square frames fabricated right on the beach. The work is being built using all the technological prowess of a post-WWII developed nation, only to be offered back to nature, to the interpenetration of land, sea and air. Most of us think of art as either being a high-end commodity or something we go to museums to see. So to have something that is open to everyone and everything, from the birds and the fishes and soon to be colonised by bivalves and seaweed, you could say that the primary audience of this work is nature, in all its forms.
“Once completed, the lowest 2m of the artwork will be slowly concealed, and revealed with the tides. We are about two-plus months in and hope to finish by end-August,” Gormley confirms.
Not every one of the 1994 Turner Prize winner’s works has to be larger than life, though. An example is Bed, one of his more memorable works after finishing postgraduate studies at the Slade School of Fine Art. Shown at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, it featured two mattress-sized slabs comprising thousands of wax-preserved slices of bread personally chomped on by Gormley.
“Why bread? It is one of the most basic and universal foods. It is also what we do, as humans, all the time — constantly transforming one state of matter into another. All I can tell you is that the eating part was tedious. I never want to have anything to do with industrially produced bread again,” he laughs.
THE SUN RISES IN THE EAST
As stated earlier, spiritually-inclined onlookers would invariably draw parallels between Elemental and parinirvana, the final, complete nirvana that represents the cessation of all physical, mental and karmic burdens. So it makes sense to know that Gormley had, in fact, spent a few years of his pre-art life in India, which he says was “incredibly formative”.
He still wears sacred red strings tied around his wrist — a tridatu from Bali, another gifted by his granddaughter after a trip to the Bezeklik Thousand Buddha Caves in Turpan, China, and the most recent from a visit to the Batu Caves temple complex in Malaysia.
It was in India that Gormley studied under the renowned Burmese-Indian Vipassana teacher, Satya Narayan Goenka, who made the technique famous as a non-sectarian, scientific practice to alleviate suffering. (Goenka himself learnt Vipassana from Sayagyi U Ba Khin to cure his severe migraines). And it is to this method of stressing the body as a channel for awareness that made Gormley consider his physical form as a base for casts. In 1981, he began making plaster moulds using his own body, bringing to mind the ancient Egyptian mummification process and the pervasive ethno-religious belief of how the human form is dualistic, comprising a shell or husk, within which the divine inner man is contained. Even the ancient Greeks subscribed to this, coining the Orphic term soma sema or how the body is but a tomb.
Zeroing in on the human form as a place of recollection and transformation, he shares a memory of working with Lady Vicken Parsons, his wife of 46 years, whom Gormley describes as his ultimate companion in art, experience and life.
What Holds Us at Galleria Continua, San Gimignano, Italy
“It was just the two of us then, and I had a studio at the bottom of the garden in our first house in Peckham, South London. Vick and I started making these body casts, which involved me just standing and being covered in plaster for an hour or two before being cut out. And you have to trust that you will be let out,” he laughs.
“But it was learning with Goenka that made me realise how our most intense experience of space — space as the potential of infinite expansion — was only through closing our eyes and, in a way, dwelling in the darkness of the body. And it is interesting how, having been brought up in the Christian tradition where the dark was always seen as something negative, that it was actually where potential lay… that darkness [offered] this freedom that was objective, edgeless and capable of infinite expansion. I have always suffered from claustrophobia, so it was also a good exercise for me to shed that fear of enclosed spaces.”
Innately drawn to the mysterious and spiritual, Gormley shares fondly of childhood trips with his father to the British Museum.
“Like all young kids, I liked going there,” he smiles. “And, somehow, I don’t remember my father bringing my brothers along, for whatever reason. I remember the colossal winged bulls from the Palace of Sargon III and the huge heads of Thutmose and Ramesses. Those, and the massive sarcophagi, really made a big impression on me.
“I keenly recall one particular mummy that wasn’t actually a mummy, as he had been mummified by natural means, the result of being placed in a shallow grave and covered with sand. We nicknamed him ‘Ginger’ as the orangey sand had literally desiccated his body, but you could still make out the skin and hair. And, unlike Peruvian mummies, which lie bound and in a foetal position, Ginger lay on his side. The museum doesn’t show him anymore, though. Human remains have now, obviously and understandably, come under question as something to be observed in a museum situation, but I, like all kids, was completely fascinated.”
Although born and raised Catholic, Gormley posits that his predilection for Eastern thinking was “pretty much the same as anyone who attended university in the late 1960s. Everybody was interested in alternative philosophies and world views to the ones they were brought up with as children. It was a time of people like David Suzuki, Coomaraswamy and Walter Evans-Wentz, and books like The Secret Life of Plants, Love’s Body and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There was also a real interest in Taoism in the late 1960s and I remember how we always used to read the Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu’s extraordinary work.”
Gormley also reminds how it was a time of global tensions, citing the Civil Rights movement and protests against the Vietnam War. “The feeling of deep shame and embarrassment about the colonial project... generally, that there were other ways of organising the world with compassion and social justice. I think, yeah, it was then I became very interested in Buddhism and Advaita, or non-duality. All of the sticks and carrots offered to me as a child, of how I was brought up with the idea that my soul was eternal and always walking this precarious line between grace and sin, and that ending up in paradise — or hell — would be according to how well I negotiated this knife-edge. And it was these dialectics, whether good or evil, left or right — this dualism, Cartesian or otherwise — that I had an instinctive desire to collapse.”
Perhaps it was this deeply rooted wish that manifested itself in a profound encounter shortly after in India. “I had spent three days in Amritsar, Punjab, as a guest at the Golden Temple and met some Tibetans there. They said, ‘Come. We have a monastery.’ I wasn’t sure where I was going and didn’t care. And so, I went with them. Somebody then announced Goenka was coming to town and was going to teach a 10-day course at the Himalayan Heights Hotel. I thought I should give that a try despite never having heard of him at all.
I soon learnt [Vipassana] was a form of knowledge that had to do with a direct apprehension of being through bearing witness to the sensations of being in a body. What was serendipity at first, quickly became surrender.”
SEVEN, THE PERFECT NUMBER
Born on Aug 30 in 1950 to parents of Irish and German ancestry, Antony Mark David Gormley was the youngest of seven children. He had been christened as such so that his initials would infer Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam — a Latin phrase coined by St Ignatius of Loyola meaning “for the greater glory of God”.
“It was my father’s joke, I think, of laying a burden on me,” he laughs, saying none of his other siblings’ names concealed secret ecclesiastical ambitions.
Gormley’s parents, who married in 1930, endured a rough patch of forced separation in 1940 after his mother, was advised by the parish priest to leave England due to the possibility of being put into an internment camp as she was German. “So she went to Canada with the four eldest children. And she was lucky because some evacuation ships ended up being torpedoed. But mother returned once the war ended and life just picked up from there. So you could say, despite being one of seven, I had never really grown up in a large family per se as the eldest siblings had, by then, got married or stayed on in North America. It was just us youngest three growing up together.”
His childhood was nevertheless highly comfortable — with a cook, nanny, au pair, chauffeur and house that overlooked the 9-hole Hampstead Golf Club — thanks to his father’s successful business running the first pharmaceutical company to commercially manufacture penicillin, after having personally signed a contract in 1945 with Sir Alexander Fleming himself. “I still have his diary from 1927 when he travelled to Penang and then Australia,” Gormley shares. “All through my youth, he was constantly coming back from somewhere… Egypt or India and the Far East.”
Besides spending weekends marvelling at the British Museum’s mummies, Gormley also frequented the National Gallery by Trafalgar Square. “Father simply loved art and owned many art books,” Gormley says. “He often took me to the National Gallery to look at his favourite painting, which was The Nativity by Piero della
Francesca and, really, the most magical painting. Being young, I liked the gruesome kind too… particularly [Jusepe de] Ribera and those other dark Spanish or Neapolitan painters. And obviously, I loved the drama of Caravaggio.”
Considering the home’s proximity to a green, weekend lessons for the Gormley children were also — pardon the pun — par for the course. “I didn’t really enjoy father trying to teach us golf every Saturday,” he says only half-jokingly. “It wasn’t the most exciting activity, from my point of view. It was more about collecting balls lost in the ditches and the rough, after which I would sell them back to the players. I would describe it as a kind of Easter egg hunt that happened all the time.”
THE RIGHT START
School was at Ampleforth College, a famous Benedictine boarding school in North Yorkshire often referred to as “the Catholic Eton” and said to be JK Rowling’s inspiration for Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. “All of us, apart from the girls and Peter, who went into the navy, attended Ampleforth.”
Gormley fondly credits it for strongly encouraging his artistic start. “I painted a lot while there and the monks were supportive, going so far as to buy my works. One day, they even gave me a wall upon which to paint a mural. It was still there until quite recently.”
When it is suggested he might have been identified as a child prodigy, Gormley, ever-humble, brushes it off, saying, “Well, no, I don’t think so. I was just a hyperactive chap who got very enthusiastic about everything. Yes, I certainly spent more time in the art room than anywhere else in the school. But it was due to the fact I wasn’t particularly good at any sport, although I was a decent runner and sailed for my school. But we would go skiing as a family every year and that was really fun — I loved that. But, no, I wasn’t very sporty. I played cricket and rugby, learnt tennis and squash… I did all that but never got a kick out of doing them like I did out of painting, drawing and making things.”
Geestgrond at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts Antwerp
Gormley singles out Father Martin Haigh and his art teacher and Ampleforth’s first Master of Drawing, John Joseph Bunting, in particular. “With Mr Bunting, it wasn’t just about saying, ‘Oh, that is a good piece of work’. He would push and ask, ‘What are you trying to say?’ It wasn’t about teaching so much as it was about recognising and giving that person a catalyst for their imagination that would grow and catch fire. I will always be grateful for these non-parental significant others who helped me make things that did not come out of books or were reproduced from the known facts or thoughts of others, but instead things that were genuinely and originally mine, and taking them seriously as well as encouraging me to take them seriously.”
Apart from art, Gormley also shares how, by the time he left school, he had successfully made two functioning radios and “a whole lot of furniture, including a collapsible sewing basket for my mum and a prayer kneeler bench”.
“Ampleforth offered a wonderful environment. There were workshops for carpentry, metalwork and electronics, and the art room was completely separate from all the others and situated right at the very heart of the school, in its oldest building. It was always open, day and night, and you could pop in whenever you wanted. I would sneak in at break-time, get on with something, then rush back after lunch to see how it had dried or if it needed a bit of extra work,” he adds.
“Of course, you hear some horror stories of boarding school today but, for me, it was great. Life at Ampleforth was always filled with interesting people who really wanted to encourage whatever passions you had. If this had not been the case, I am not sure I would be speaking with you today. In fact, home was probably more disciplined than school. Being the youngest, the rhythms of family life had already been decided. I was rarely asked to contribute and certainly was never consulted, so I just went along with things. In a way, I suppose I was an annoyance — being the last of three boys — but that instilled a certain independence in me right from the very beginning.”
Further studies at Cambridge’s Trinity College followed, where Gormley studied archaeology, anthropology and history of art. It was only upon his return from India and Sri Lanka — “It was three years of living in dhotis, longyis and khadi shirts” — in 1974 that he decided to pursue formal art training: first, at the Central School of Art and Design, followed by Goldsmiths College, and then a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade, where he met his wife. “I went to art school and got filled up with all the ideas that come from a history of our species, making images and objects that carry experience, only to end up rejecting all of it post-India,” he says. “I left university not confident that I would be an artist.”
Gormley, however, does concede his parents were initially supportive. “But to a certain extent,” he winks. “Father used to take the poems I wrote, get them typed up by his secretary and then bring them home. They also sent me to the Camden Art Centre for painting courses and things like that. But both equally believed the life of an artist was intrinsically high-risk. So I think they wanted to ‘save me’ from that. Not that I knew what I really wanted to do then, anyway. As a child, I thought that I would be a train driver or astronaut or something.
“Growing up, father was always trying to get me to think about going into business and would be extra encouraging when I got holiday jobs, working as a runner for a bank and all that,” he adds, chuckling.
“But, in all honesty, I never, ever wanted to fit into that world. I would like to think that the test of a really successful education is that you are entirely unemployable; that you will work out what is ultimately of value to you and then go on to inspire as well as employ others. That has certainly been true for me. The modernist idea of the loneliness of an alienated and isolated individual, or the artist who determines their own labour — or at least the conditions of their own labour — has not been my experience at all. If there is one incredible lesson I have learnt in life, it is this: If you follow your intuition, others will want to come and help.”
