Sculptor Antony Gormley discusses aging, exhibitions, and the pressures of achieving greatness
Australian collectors covet the work of Antony Gormley, one of the world’s most in-demand artists. At 73, the sculptor unveils his stately home takeover and discusses the privileges of success.
Antony Gormley is obsessed with the passage of time. Many of his works contain the word “time” in the title. His army of silent, featureless iron figures interrogate time and the relationship between humans, geology and nature over the course of our planet’s history. The artist is also listening to the clock ticking on his own lifetime, he says when we meet at his London studios. At 73 he is filled with a sense of urgency. Does he feel, like David Hockney, that he must be even more productive as he gets older because the days are running out? “Yes,” he replies, leaning forward and nodding vigorously. “I feel that very, very strongly. I’ve got maybe a fifth or a sixth of my life left to live and I don’t want to waste it. Time is the most precious, fugitive material.”
Gormley works in a space just north of King’s Cross in London. From the outside, it looks like a small factory, and there’s a constant hum of drilling and banging. His office is up an iron staircase above one of the workshops. In person, I’m struck by how youthful he looks. He’s 1.9 metres tall and lean, with a healthy glow on his cheeks; I can well imagine him still producing art in his nineties. Gormley’s body shape is familiar to anyone who has seen his work because the artist has been using it for more than 40 years as a mould for his sculptures, and he doesn’t appear to have altered in that time. There’s no sign of any spread round the waist or a stoop to the shoulders.
Not since Henry Moore or Barbara Hepworth has a sculptor connected with the British public on such a scale. His sculptures can be found in public spaces, from Plymouth to Margate, Merseyside to Leith. Every new show is an event. One hundred of Gormley’s life-size figures have now taken up residence in the house and gardens of Houghton Hall, a Georgian stately home in Norfolk, just down the road from the Prince and Princess of Wales’s country retreat on the Sandringham estate. Back in his studio, the artist brings up images and a map of the grounds on his computer screen to show how and where the figures have been placed across a spread of 120 hectares. Some are buried up to their waist or neck, while others stand on the ground or above it on a plinth. Gormley estimates that it will take the average visitor two to three hours to walk around the entire work.
These photographs, taken on a misty morning, reveal an army of silent men, frozen in time, surveying the manicured landscape of an English Versailles. There is something almost judgmental about them. Are they everymen questioning the privilege of their surroundings? “By implication, yes,” Gormley says. “In this ever more divided world, between rich and poor, between the one per cent and the rest, where does justice come in?” I ask whether the contemporary art world is a reflection of those huge divisions in wealth to which he refers, thinking about the one per cent who travel round the world to art fairs in Basel, Hong Kong and Miami and spend a million dollars on a single Gormley figure. “Yes, and that’s a responsibility I must take. I’m immensely grateful to people who are keen enough to collect my work, but in my view, that puts a responsibility on me to make works that are more accessible, in collective spaces.”
Gormley is the youngest of seven children, born into a devout Catholic family in which religion dominated daily life. His father, who fought in World War I, was loving but authoritarian. His mother was German and during World War II had to leave Britain for Canada to avoid being interned; she took the four eldest children with her. Gormley, who was born in Hampstead, North London, in 1950, was baptised Antony Mark David Gormley so that he should have the same initials as the Latin motto for the Society of Jesus: Ad majorem Dei gloriam – for the greater glory of God. He went to Ampleforth College, a Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire, then the University of Cambridge, where he studied archaeology, anthropology and the history of art. He lost his Catholic faith as an undergraduate, but admits that it marked him for life. You only have to look at his best-loved sculpture, The Angel of the North in Gateshead, to see the influence of Christian iconography.
After graduating in 1971, he joined the hippy trail to Afghanistan and ended up spending two years in India. At one point, having run out of money, he slept on the streets of Calcutta, an experience that fed into his first sculpture: a homeless figure made from plaster and linen that lies curled on the ground covered in a sheet. It was during that time that he immersed himself in the study of vipassana meditation, which focuses on the interconnection between the mind and body. He even contemplated becoming a Buddhist monk before deciding to return to Britain and study art at the Slade School of Fine Art, where he met his fellow artist Vicken Parsons, whom he married in 1980. They have a daughter who is an architect and two sons, the founder of GoodGym and the founder of Jolly Discs.
One of the things you notice about Gormley is how calm and centred he appears. There is a strong spiritual element running through his work, demonstrated by his sense of purpose and desire to give a voice to the voiceless. The Angel of the North, which looms over Britain’s perennially busy A1 motorway, was intended to mark
the end of industrial power in the northeast while making a “totemic sculpture for a community that had lost its faith in the future”. To make it, he employed the engineering and shipwrighting skills for which the region was once world-renowned.
Place and setting is critical to Gormley’s work. His new show at Houghton Hall is a case in point. He clicks on a photograph of a sculpture half-buried in the floor of the entrance hall of the property, which is home to David and Rose, the Marquess and Marchioness of Cholmondeley. It was the first work to go in, the baseline from which all the other figures take their position. The idea is to create a single horizontal plane across the landscape and the geological processes that shaped it. I express surprise that the Cholmondeleys allowed him to drill a hole in their hall floor. He nods. “David and Rose are very committed to this. They even agreed to leave their front and back doors open during the exhibition so you can look straight through.”
The name of the work at Houghton Hall is Time Horizon. Gormley thinks of his iron army as industrially made fossils representing a period in time. As visitors wander across the lawns, through the woods and walled gardens, he hopes they reflect on the impermanence of humans on Earth and the imprint our species has left. “The whole of Britain is a garden, a living landscape painting of the nature we would like to live in.”
Time Horizon was originally commissioned in 2006 for an archaeological site in Italy. The manufacture of the 100 iron sculptures – all moulded from the artist’s body – was paid for by the taxpayers of Catanzaro province. The irony of European money funding an artwork in the UK is not lost on Gormley, who was passionate about the UK remaining in the European Union. Thanks to his mother, he has a German passport and sees himself as a European artist.
“There is a German idealistic philosophical tradition that I’ve been formed by, and Germany has been very generous in its support of me.” His work Another Place, comprising 100 cast iron sculptures of his body planted in the sand on Crosby Beach in Merseyside, was a German commission. The fabrication was paid for by the taxpayers of Schleswig-Holstein. Critical Mass II, which went on display at the Royal Academy in London, was funded by Austrian money.
“Brexit was the biggest act of self-harm this country has ever played on itself, and what a betrayal. It [the EU] is a creative, collective project, which found a way of putting Europe back together after two devastating world wars. And I think of all the things we have lost, from Erasmus scholarships to all those musicians and artists who can no longer travel freely between Britain and Europe.”
Given that he uses industrial processes and engineering to make his art, is it hard to find assistants with the right skills? “Yes. There used to be foundries in most cities in this land, but now there are fewer and fewer. We had to take over our foundry in [British town of] Hexham because it was going to shut down. It couldn’t compete with Russia, China and India.” There were 23 employees when he bought the foundry; seven of them stayed on and were combined with seven people who had trained at art school. “The cross-fertilisation has been extraordinary. Nobody had asked any of these workers how they might do things differently or better. It’s been a brilliant experience.”
Gormley thinks the collapse of arts education in Britain is “tragic”. “There has been something like a 40 per cent reduction in people wanting to study art history or archaeology or art at secondary level. If we are not renewing the sources of creativity – be it singing, playing an instrument, dancing, it doesn’t matter what – how can we bring new forms into the world? We are all going to become slaves of AI; managers of late capitalism. We wouldn’t have got The Beatles without Liverpool College of Art.”
When Gormley was 11, Father Ambrose from Ampleforth gave him a lump of wood and some tools and showed him how to make a bench. He still has it. “It was an unbelievable gift. It gave me agency and made me realise I could contribute to this world, and I think that’s what art rooms can provide in schools.” He also credits his father with taking him to the National Gallery and the British Museum as a small child.
“We are unbelievably lucky that our museums are free. We lead the world in this, but we must fight to keep this.” Art must not, he says, be sidelined in schools. “Politicians come and go, but what defines our hopes, fears and values is the art we produce. That will be remembered long after we’re all gone.”
Time Horizon is at Houghton Hall, Norfolk, until October 31; houghtonhall.com
This story is from the June issue of WISH.
