 (1990) by Antony Gormley was exhibited as part of Sculpture In The City 2014: the acclaimed annual public realm sculpture exhibition held in East London. The work is one of the artist’s first castings in iron. It is part of a transitional phase in the early 1990s between making hollow lead bodycases and solid iron bodyforms.

The works are made by taking a mould of the artist’s wrapped body and then putting layer after layer of plaster over that first mould until the form becomes a smooth shell. This relationship between a precise register of the topography of a particular body on the inside and a generalised casing on the outside or the tension between particular and universal has been explored in different ways at different times in the work. Manufacture becomes metaphor in the six threaded lugs that use the holes that held the core as hermetic seals of the internal space.

The work indicates a human space in space at large. It is an objectified space, subject to gravity and to atmospheric pressure.

The installation of the work put these two exclusive hermetic vessels in the public domain in such a way as they become active; the fifteen degree lean making the inertia of these heavy, void, safe boxes react with the flow of human bodies that pass them.

St. Mary Axe

, 1990, cast iron, 2 body-forms, each 192 × 46 × 35 cm. Installation view. St. Marys Axe, London, 2013. Photograph by Robb Mcrae.