A suite of eleven linear etchings made with a hard needle produced for the exhibition 

Whilst they return to a graphic mode of representation, the etchings also evoke states of embodiment and freedom; an enmeshment within a bounded body and release into space.

Etchings

A series of seven woodcut prints produced for the exhibition 

 at Alan Cristea Gallery, London in 2016 and printed at Thumbprint Editions, London.

Based on seven distinct body poses, they reinterpret anatomy in the language of architecture and relate to a key work in the artist's recent practice, 

 (2014), which applies the principles of an expanding universe to the subjective space of the body. At well over life-size, the prints are made from blocks of sawn plywood to create multiple, ghost-like impressions of a bodily architecture.

Woodblocks

A series of ten aquatints from multiple plates produced for the exhibition 

 at Alan Cristea Gallery, London in 2016.

 prints are constructed from single plates and carry the silhouette of architectural blocks printed one on top of the other. This accumulation of black conveys a sense of inner embodied darkness. Each plate is created with rosin ground by hand, the resulting particles gently sifted through a sieve before being heated to make a granular ground.

Aquatints

A series of unique crude oil and petroleum jelly body prints produced for the exhibition 

The transfer is achieved by Gormley falling directly onto the paper, the weight of his body leaving a corresponding print. The sacral use of crude oil as representative of the 'blood of the earth' highlights our dependency on the planet's solar memory.

Body Prints

This series of prints, created in Copenhagen in June 2013, develops out of recent architectural concerns and from images made in London and New York in the mid-1990s. The two themes are body and space, involving the implication of distance, arbitrariness of measurement and dis-orientation of the normal relations with ground, sky, horizon or architecture. 

Employing measurement and perspective, the work then tries to subvert them. The prints are made with the same oil stain and black pigment used in another series made at Edition Copenhagen in June 2007. The images are achieved with both sharp, flat silhouettes and organic fluid bodies, which occupy open but sometimes measured grounds.

 transmit a sense of subjective internal body spaces released from the constraints of gravity as black holes.

 and II take inspiration from personal history and the Viking exhibition at the National Museum in Copenhagen. They invite the viewer, through Rorschach-like fluid presences, to imagine oneself reflected in the water below the prow of an arriving longboat.

 recalls the ‘tanker’ work of the same name. It is an image of the expansion of concentrated, lived space. It attempts to apply the Hubble Constant to the body, its volumes translated into orthogonal cells expanded to merge into one another.

 are two flat, black landscapes of mirage-like horizons: one with a distant silhouette of a road or a roof that breaks the horizon line and another where the horizon is dished, with low cirrus cloud hanging along its edge. The challenge was to create the maximum tension between the flatness of the black plane and the illusions of distance.

 imagines the end of time as a field of bodies all rendered as silhouettes which look at the sky in a position of dread. An implied perspective is undermined by uncertain scale and by the silhouettes being distributed over a ground that muddles cartographic mapping and the romantic landscape associations of Abstract Expressionism.

 use a 90 degree relationship between vertical and horizontal lines to indicate a human space in space with the tentativeness of a diagnostic register.

Copenhagen Editions

Limited edition etchings produced on the occasion of exhibitions and projects including 

, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, UK (2010), 

Project Prints

Etchings produced on the occasion of the touring exhibition 

, which travelled to the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico (2008) and the Antiguo Colegio de San Ildefonso, Mexico City, Mexico (2009).

Mexico Tour Prints

A series of lithograph prints produced during a residency at the Edition Copenhagen workshop in Denmark in 2007.

This series of prints is a response to the physical act of printing: an image that leaves its own trace of weight on the paper. I wanted to return to its origins: wood, ink and paper. The works are made by dividing singular plates into a number of parts and inking them separately, using very high pressure and a mass of oil paint and drying agent. It is important that you can see the grain of the plywood of the plates very clearly when looking from the side.

 is a meditation on light and dark, mass and space, being and becoming. The prints invoke the darkness of the body. Objects normally rendered as forms revealed by light are transformed into planes of darkness, and volume is translated into silhouette. It is a play between positive and negative: the archway with a double lintel opening becomes, in a second print, the ground for the black rectangle of a door. The flipping of figure and ground is common to all of these works: the paired egg shapes of the eyes or testicles, for example, could be conceived both as both paired forms or openings out onto darkness.

The motifs of being, becoming and dreaming are figured in the back, the baby and the sleeping head, but there are also themes of generation: of binary division of a cell, the testicles and the lingam column.

The challenge was to make images that are both diagrams and evocations of the space of consciousness and the built world; to provide meditational devices that lead to an inner world of reverie and release. Representational art has concentrated on the way that objects are revealed through light falling on their surfaces; 

 attempts to address what lies at the other side of appearance.

Bearing Light

, the exterior and interior spaces of the body are unified. The prints have a sequence and can be seen as a meditation on two-ness and oneness. The body has within it unity and division, single foci like the mouth, the navel, the penis, that lie on the body’s central axis; and dualities like the hands or the eyes that function in pairs.

While the white prints bear the imprints of hands, knees, forehead and spine, the five black prints each represent one of the body’s main orifices, which appear as white marks on a black ground. Although made from actual body impressions, their anatomical origin is deliberately unclear: they might be quite different natural forms such as shells, a comet, a planet, or a primitive life form. The effect is of being inside the body and looking out at the universe:

‘At first I spent some time considering objects with which I shared the world, that both existed within the sphere of a personal life and threatened it - they seemed to have a certainty about them - some hold on time and place.

Now I have crossed the threshold and have come to this closed ground of the body and I feel less certain. Before I was happy to explore, at arm’s length, the abstract relations of form and content - now my horizons are both more circumscribed and more infinite, for one cannot touch the body without considering the soul - these things cannot be described, cannot be represented but somehow, if the certainty can be focused, if a true account can be given of the material facts, a potential might be expressed - which is where these prints may be relevant.

There is something about printing and the way that it encourages the maker of a plate to think about the mirror of his image and the reversal of his negatives and positives that links with the oppositions that have driven and exasperated me. Printing makes one treat day as night, and relieves the monotony of always living in one or the other.

In the work generally, I have tried to make a bridge between the inner and outer worlds, to bring light to weight to light. These prints are a continuation of the attempt. Printing was invented to touch the mind by disseminating the word. I am trying to return the mind to the body.’

 is a series of 9 etchings published in 1990 by The Paragon Press, London, England

Drawing Prints

Etchings

Woodblocks

Aquatints

Body Prints

Copenhagen Editions

Project Prints

Mexico Tour Prints

Copenhagen Editions

Bearing Light

Body And Soul