Between the Spirit of the Ancestors and the Unborn

From Antony Gormley: Ground, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Netherlands, 2022

I encountered one of Antony Gormley’s Field works for the first time at the age of thirteen, in 2005, when Field for the British Isles was shown in my hometown at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. I remember attempting to make eye contact with each figure in turn, trying to discern its expression from the two pencil-tip holes of its eyes, from the incline of its head, from the slightest incidental impression – or complete absence – of a mouth. I remember feeling judged by some, implored by others, comforted by a few. I felt inexplicably afraid of and grateful to them, uncertain of my power and place in relation to them, and yet strangely energised. I remember, most of all, the difficulty with which I prized myself away from them when it was time to leave, as if I hadn’t yet learned everything these mute beings could tell me. I came back another day, in different light, to find out more.

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the UN Conference on the Environment, or first Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, which brought together an unprecedented number of political leaders, diplomats, scientists and NGO representatives from 179 countries to address already urgent issues of environmental protection and socio-economic development. To coincide with the Earth Summit, twenty-five international artists were invited to cities across the Brazilian Amazon to create works, using local materials alone, that would raise awareness of threats to the rainforest environment and its people. It was in this context that Gormley made Amazonian Field (1992), presented in this exhibition at Voorlinden. Together with young people from the favelas of Porto Velho he created 24,000 figures from locally sourced clay. Each maker found their own way to mould a handful of earth into a bodyform and to define its deep, close-set eyes with a pointed wooden stick, an act Gormley described as both ‘a moment of concentration for the maker [and] the moment in which the clay becomes conscious’.¹ The concentrated energy of that moment – repeated 48,000 times in the making process – lives on at Voorlinden today.

The Amazon had become, in Gormley’s words at the time, the environmental ‘conscience of the world’, with widespread media coverage of deforestation drawing international attention to the unfolding environmental crisis in the region.² Since that first Earth Summit, at least 400,000 square kilometres of the rainforest – around ten times the area of the Netherlands – have been destroyed.³ The region is now rapidly approaching a catastrophic ‘tipping point’, emitting more carbon than it captures and accelerating the climatic changes that cause the forest further harm. What does it mean to encounter Amazonian Field now? What might our still, silent mass of clay bodies do? Perhaps they entreat us to think of the human costs of our collective greed, to reflect on our connections to, as well as differences from, these roughly but lovingly worked clods of earth. They might appeal to our conscience, entreat us to act, to feel a sense of urgency rising through our own bodies from the earth beneath our feet. We might become more aware of ourselves, in Gormley’s words, as ‘the living generation between the spirit of the ancestors and the unborn’, as those responsible for our collective future.⁴ One thing seems certain: that Field is the domain of the transitive verb. In their multitude and their containment, these figures act upon us.

‘We need to borrow the energy from the future to overturn the conditions of the present’, philosopher Rosi Braidotti (1954) writes: ‘We need to empower people to will, to want, to desire, a different world, to extract […] from the misery of the present joyful, positive, affirmative relations and practices.’⁵ If, thirty years on from the first Earth Summit, we might feel indignation, accusation even, in the collective eyes of these clay bodies, they also invite us to imagine a different world, the world of the yet unborn, and borrow its energy to reshape our actions in the present. At Voorlinden, where the museum architecture has been designed specifically to maximise the potential of natural light, the use of its single artificially lit gallery space for Field lends the work an even greater intensity. We, the living generation, can choose to move out into the natural light afforded by the windows outside the gallery space; we can choose to borrow the collective energy of these still, mute beings to make change, as we see fit, in the present. This is both our privilege and our responsibility.

‘Part of the responsibility of the sculptor,’ Gormley noted, ‘is to understand the site, and that means the geology, the human history, and the social present-time context’.⁶ This sense of responsibility is nowhere more apparent at Voorlinden than in Critical Mass (1995), with its 60 life-sized cast iron body forms – crouching, squatting, kneeling, sitting, standing – installed across the museum grounds. Gormley has spoken of the work as ‘an anti-monument evoking the victims of the twentieth century’ and it has taken on different resonances in each of its presentations: bearing witness to the Holocaust at an old tram storage unit in Vienna; to the human suffering that propped up the achievements of renaissance Humanism at the Forte Belvedere, Florence; to the victims of the Cultural Revolution at a former Communist Party headquarters in Changsha, China.⁷ Gormley has described Critical Mass as ‘a poultice gathering the dark liquid residues of tragedy’: even in their impermeable materiality, these bodyforms seem to draw out the specific ‘residues of tragedy’ of each place and carry them, accumulating, beyond any individual context.⁸

Arriving at Voorlinden, we are greeted by the sequence of bodyforms installed in a line across the lawn, evoking the Darwinian ‘ascent of man’ from a foetal position, face towards the grass, to a fully erect stance, eyes skywards. Towards a brighter future? And yet, there is a sense of unsteadiness, instability, in the postures that lead to this point of apparent heroism. The ninth and tenth figures in the series appear to teeter on the edge of a fall, one forwards, one backwards, before reaching a state of triumphant equilibrium. Even as I write, I get out of my chair to hold these postures myself and feel the reciprocal synergy between muscle groups, some contracting and others lengthening in the service of stillness, of managing not to fall.

Beyond this sequence of twelve bodyforms, a version of the ninth figure lies toppled over a brick wall, its eyeless gaze towards the floor, the soles of its feet uprooted, buttocks exposed. In spite (or defiance) of the ‘residues of tragedy’ absorbed and carried by Critical Mass, there is often a sense of absurd humour in these toppling and toppled figures. In his text, On Laughter, philosopher Henri Bergson offers an image of a man falling in the street in front of passers-by, who laugh, he suggests, because the man’s muscles ‘continued to perform the same movement when the circumstances called for something else’.⁹ The comedy of the situation, Bergson proposes, lies in the perception of the human being as suddenly rigid, inelastic, inert, in there being ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living’.¹⁰ Gormley refers to the bodyforms of Critical Mass as ‘industrialised fossils’, with the imperfections of the plaster mould surface reproduced on the cast iron, the flash lines that delineate the parts of the whole, and the button-like out-runners of the metal pouring announcing the mechanics of their making.¹¹ Looking at photographs of this studio process, we see, quite literally, the plaster being encrusted upon the living’, not as a comic act in itself but as a way of registering a particular body at a particular moment in time.Once cast in iron – made inelastic – and placed as if falling head-long over the wall, this bodyform seems to take on its particular kind of tragicomic pathos, an ‘industrialised fossil’ confined to the moment of its making, incapable of response. That response, whatever it may be, is left for us to make.

In 1912, the Voorlinden estate came into the hands of Hugo Loudon (1860-1941), shortly after a merger between the oil company he had co-founded in the Netherlands, the Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, and its British counterpart, Shell Transport and Trading Company. It was during this period of rapid expansion for the Royal Dutch Shell Group, and the global fossil fuel market, that Louden commissioned the design of the country house, its surrounding gardens and brick terraces from British architect R. J. Johnston. While oil has served as a fundamental driver of technological, social and economic development over the past two centuries, there is now no doubt that these developments have been made – and worse, continue to be made – at the expense of the forests and oceans, animal and plant biodiversity, and the lives and livelihoods of indigenous communities. Where the presentation of Critical Mass at the Forte Belvedere explored the ‘dialectic between aspirational and abject’ across centuries, here at Voorlinden, the brick wall built on the profits of natural reserves has become a literal stumbling block for this lone bowing bodyform, with the barely veiled reminder that the ecological and human cost of ‘progress’ remains high.¹²

At the museum entrance we encounter a pile of bodyforms installed as if dumped, like landfill, from the back of a shipping container, or like victims of genocide, natural disaster or infectious disease stacked for mass cremation, their postures frozen by the onset of rigor mortis. Throughout the woodland beyond the museum, figures are placed among the trees, as if felled and left abandoned. Here, only one figure is left standing, partially submerged in a narrow waterway that charts its path through the trees. It looks to the water as if contemplating its place – its function and its privilege – in relation to the ecosystems disturbed by and re-forming around its feet. This emphatic focus on the water reminds me of the proximity of the North Sea, just two kilometres across the Wassenaar dunes, and I imagine a possible future in which the rising sea-levels have swallowed up these lowlands entirely. The figures, now dispersed across the seabed, have become habitats for marine life, encrusted with barnacles like their counterparts in Another Place on Crosby Beach, UK. The figure of man, once the centre of a Vitruvian universe, has been deposed, colonised by the very forces of nature it sought to exploit.

In Gormley’s sculpture Exposure (2010), permanently installed 100 km north-east of Voorlinden on the Flevoland polder, 2000 galvanised steel rods describe a crouching figure, 26 metres in height, looking into the distance across the Markermeer. Described by Gormley as ‘a still point in a moving world’, the sculpture draws attention both to the threat of sea-level rise and the ingenuity of the Dutch response to environmental change across centuries. ‘Over time’, Gormley writes, ‘should the rising of the sea level mean that there has to be a rising of the dike, there should be a progressive burying of the work’.¹³ Back under the shade of the museum canopy at Voorlinden, another crouching figure faces its own, more modest, expanse of water. One of the easier positions of the series to maintain during casting, Gormley has described the crouching posture as derived from the figure of the ancient Egyptian scribe ‘who chooses not to act in order to witness’.¹⁴ For ‘the living generation’ in our state of environmental crisis, however, the choice not to act in order to witness has become an ethically, if not physically, untenable position. If there is justification for producing and transporting these sculptures across continents – a question each institution and studio must ask itself as a matter of urgency – then perhaps it is to this end: that the works, as Gormley hopes, might become ‘catalysts for awareness and grounds for physical and imaginative inhabitation’. And that we leave this inhabitation galvanised to make change in the world where we can.

If these sculptures act as ‘grounds for physical and imaginative inhabitation’, they are also materially grounded in the Earth itself. Discussing the ancient Egyptian statue of Ramesses II in the British Museum collection, Gormley refers to the importance of a sculpture’s material in ‘conveying the relationship between human-lived biological time and […] the eons of geological time’.¹⁵ Where the statue of Ramesses II is carved in granite, an igneous rock formed from the slow crystallization of magma below Earth's surface, Gormley cast the bodyforms of Critical Mass in iron, the most abundant chemical element of the Earth’s core, which he heated to the same temperature as the upper levels of the magma (around 1300 degrees Celsius) before pouring it into the mould.¹⁶ In Feel III (2016), Gormley coated his body in crude oil and petroleum jelly before falling onto a sheet of paper, allowing the crude oil – in Gormley’s words, ‘the blood of the earth’ – to register the moment of his body meeting the paper ground.¹⁷ In Pile I (2017), also shown at Voorlinden, an assemblage of fourteen wedged and rounded clay slabs are stacked to describe a curled-up human form. Fired at a low temperature to retain the character of its raw material, Pile I seems to pull our energy earthwards, as if through the gallery’s oak flooring and foundations to the sand, silt and soil – the bedrock, mantle and core – beneath.

Whether using naturally-sourced materials or otherwise, Gormley’s work reveals a life-long preoccupation with the depths of space within and around us, from our immediate bodily context to the furthest reaches, yet unknown, of our expanding universe. Looking back to the etymological roots of the word that gives the exhibition its title, ‘ground’ is derived from the Proto-Germanic grundu- (‘deep place’), whose usage in Old and Middle English seems to range from the surface of the earth and bottom of the sea to the pit of a hollow object or human organ. In Gormley’s early sculpture the inclusion of ‘air’ alongside lead, fibreglass and plaster in the medium description points towards the equal importance the artist places on the material and the immaterial, and the primacy of that ‘deep place’ within the body – within each organ and each cell – which marks it out as a site of subjective experience (‘grounds for inhabitation’) as well as an object to be encountered from without.

Gormley draws an important distinction between the solid ‘bodyforms’ of Critical Mass, which materialise the space of the human body, and the earlier ‘bodycases’, whose beaten lead exteriors enclose the plaster mould that once, in turn, registered the space and internal energies of the human body. Of the early lead works shown at Voorlinden, A Corner for Kasimir (1992), Lock I (1994) and Over the Earth (1987-89) are hermetic, the darkness of their internal space fully enclosed, accessed only by imaginative means. It is only when we encounter Membrane (1986), with apertures cut through the lead and plaster in the place of eyes, that we are given direct physical access to the darkness of this enclosed space. If the eye cavities in the clay figures of Field register the moment in which the inert lump of clay is energised, ‘becomes conscious’, here they seem to recall a release of internal pressure into the surrounding space, an exhale after a long-held breath. These apertures present the body as a resonating chamber for its environment, like the f-shaped holes on a stringed instrument which allow the resonating body to vibrate more freely and provide an outlet for the vibrating air inside the instrument to travel into the space beyond. This imagined transference of energy between interior and exterior opens up a dynamic that permeates much of Gormley’s work from the early 1980s onwards: the inextricable relationship between the space that contains the body and the space that the body contains.

‘What I am working towards,’ Gormley wrote in 1984, ‘is a total identification of all existence with my point of contact with the material world: my body’.¹⁸ Approaching Membrane from one angle, the flat lead sheet seems at once to shield the bodycase from the viewer and to announce the materials of its making. This leaden membrane, held taut as an animal hyde between outstretched arms, emphasises the skin as the ‘point of contact with the material world’, the site of interplay between surface and depth, between external appearance and embodied experience, between separation and enclosure. In Chromosome (1984), displayed nearby, the bodycase has been opened up entirely, each half floating in a water-filled zinc bathtub. Where the ‘deep place’ of the human body in Membrane is registered in the nesting of air within plaster within lead, here the interior space of the bodycase is laid bare, its exterior surface obscured from view by the water, the elemental amniotic, that cradles it. In the meniscus that forms at the point of connection between water and lead, fluid and solid, we are reminded of another kind of membrane – the tension across the water’s surface – and the often invisible forces that govern our physical existence.

In Expansion Field (2014) Gormley takes the concept of cosmic expansion – the idea that the dimension of space itself is expanding – and tests its application to the spaces of the human body. Where the earlier bodyforms and bodycases involved casting Gormley’s body in plaster over several hours to register a specific posture, in this series he used an optical scanner to capture a fleeting moment of lived time, which could then be translated into a loose constellation of blocks and cubes in computer modelling software. Keeping the central point of each block fixed, the forms were expanded in all dimensions, gesturing to a cosmological model in which the relative positions of objects in an expanding universe remain constant despite increasing distances between them. Through this process of incremental expansion, the blocks begin to converge, overlap, at times entirely consume one another. We can even start to imagine a point along this trajectory – a different point for each posture, depending on the distance from core to extremities – where the bodycase would become a single, all-encompassing cube, enclosing the infinitely expanding darkness that we glimpse through the eyes of Membrane.

If Expansion Field invites us to contemplate the dark matter and energy of an edgeless, ever-extending universe, it does so by offering a direct physical encounter with these weighty figures, their growth arrested at varying points and their forms translated into Corten steel, a material whose name announces its stability through its corrosion resistance and tensile strength. It is the combined suggestion and frustration of infinite expansion, a defined material presence set against imagined vastness, that lends Expansion Field its conceptual and physical weight. Gormley refers to these figures as ‘tankers’ – they are vessels of day-to-day human industry as well as cosmological imagination – and my mind shifts to the North Sea tankers visible, on a clear day, from the dunes at the highest point of the Voorlinden estate. Shifting once again, I find myself back with the lone figure toppled over Louden’s country house wall, and I wonder, however anxiously, at the connectedness of all these things.

This sense of connectivity, at once wonderful and vertiginous, is echoed in the series of works on paper, entitled Precipitate (2017-18). From a distance, the fine web of lines seems to hover across the entire surface of the ground as if drawn directly onto the paper in graphite with white chalk highlights. Move closer and we see that these are not so much works on paper as in paper. After soaking the paper with a carbon and casein wash, Gormley incised the web of lines with an etching burin, allowing the abraded surface to absorb the pigment and water at different rates according to the varying widths, depths and intersections of each scratch. This is an exploration of depth on a minute scale, within the thickness of a piece of paper, and any sense of linear perspective dissolves into a matrix of lines that stretches into and around and away from the page, ‘resembling simulations of synaptic activity or the plasma of deep intergalactic space’.¹⁹ Despite their difference in scale, these drawings seem to echo the experience of standing between the feet of Gormley’s Flevoland sculpture, Exposure, my head barely reaching its ankles, and looking through layer upon layer of tetrahedral frames to the sky above. While Exposure clearly describes its crouching human figure when viewed at a distance, at close quarters the human form dissolves into abstraction and, with it, the sense of perspective it offered to a seemingly infinite landscape of inland sea and sky. For as long as any part of this sculpture remains above sea and above ground, it will offer us an invitation to see and feel differently, according to different and interconnecting frames of reference, what it means to inhabit this body in this world.

Breathing Room III (2010), one of nine works by Gormley in the permanent collection at Voorlinden, offers an alternative, and perhaps more disquieting, experience of shifting perspectives. Breathing Room invites us into an open structure of square-section aluminium tubing, describing the vertices of seven overlapping cuboids, which are equal in volume but extended along different axes. Coated in photo-luminescent paint, the framework and the people within and around it are alternately plunged into forty seconds of near-blinding light and ten minutes of darkness, illuminated only by the residual blue light discharged by the painted frames. ‘If perspective and orthogonal architecture in the West are the ways in which space is described and contained,’ Gormley writes, this work acts as ‘an attempt to open up those limiting characteristics’.²⁰ The installation offers us a sense of architectural geometry and the structuring principles of linear perspective, but denies the fixity of a single vanishing point. It is almost as if we have transgressed the Corten steel boundaries of an Expansion Field figure and are sensing, yet still not wholly understanding, its internal structure: the spectral, overlapping cuboids of its making.

If Breathing Room allows us to experience the disorientating effect of multiple vanishing points, it is the temporal structure – the sudden change from dark to light and back again – that encourages us to probe the dynamics between individual and collective experience. In the darkness, we become fleeting silhouettes against the glowing framework, knowable only to ourselves and recognisable only to those intimately acquainted with our stature and gait as we move, often haltingly, between the luminous vertices. With the sudden burst of light comes a collective intake of breath and shielding of eyes, a revelation of our locations in shared space and the objecthood of the structure around which we turn. As our eyes grow sufficiently accustomed to this interrogative light, we might see veins under the skin of our neighbours’ hands, the texture of skin under layers of make-up, the individual hairs that make up a pair of eyebrows, raised in surprise. After the anonymity afforded by the darkness comes the inescapable vulnerability, perhaps even shame, of so clearly seeing and being seen, of finding our common ground.

Outside the gallery that gives its space to Breathing Room, we encounter Passage (2016), a twelve-metre long tunnel in six millimetre weathering steel, open only at one end where the cross section is revealed as a rectilinear human form, standing straight, arms by its sides. We are invited inside this tunnel, one at a time, to walk its length – or as far as we dare go into the darkness, towards its dead end. The structure is elevated a few millimetres off the floor, un-grounded, just enough for my footsteps to reverberate along the steel base, making me aware of the shifting acoustic as I walk deeper into the darkness. I stop some way down its length, wondering how it would feel to go back prematurely. Somehow reminded of the fate of Eurydice as Orpheus turns (this feels like a mythic journey), I press on, further into my own shadow. Encountering the end of the tunnel with my slightly outstretched arms, I turn and start to walk back the way I came, towards the light and, with it, the sense of seeing and being seen anew, a return from the first-person singular to the plural of the gallery concourse.

Through the west-facing windows at the end of Passage, the garden designed by Piet Oudolf is in bloom, a perennial hymn to the cycles of nature. In the shade of the alder trees beyond, a seated figure from Critical Mass perches atop an electricity box, marking out a feature of the built environment that we often seek to camouflage, as if to forget our dependence on the networks of cables and connectors and currents that we have engineered in our service. Rosi Braidotti characterises our condition with the compound word ‘we-are-in-this-together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same’, in which we refers equally to humans, ‘with respect for the structural differences and inequalities that compose our social existence’, and to non-human life-forms, the ecological, the geological, the technological.²¹ Through his work, Gormley does not claim to give us answers, or even defined questions, in our approach to structural inequalities or our relationship to the past, present and possible futures of our planet. Rather, he offers an invitation to pause, to think and feel more deeply into the spaces within and between us, the earth beneath our feet, our place in an expanding universe.

Still standing near the opening of Passage, I turn my head to the right and am met by 24,000 pairs of questioning eyes, carved into Amazonian clay three decades ago. As I prize myself away from their collective gaze once more, the silent promise I make to myself and to these roughly modelled figures is this: that I am returning to the world more aware of my humble place within it and determined to do better in its honour.