How Gormley’s latest work is very big news

In a modest steelyard in East Lothian, trucks are busy delivering loads of rivets and bolts; rolls of metal piping have been stacked up against the fence.

There’s nothing remarkable about that — save for one thing. Squatting behind a low workshop is the huge metal figure of a man, a looming presence on a misty morning.

This is Exposure, a new sculpture by Antony Gormley, his biggest yet, and it is massive in almost every way.

Like all his work, Exposure began as a cast of the artist himself, but it has grown tall since then. The figure reaches 25.5 metres (84ft), 5 metres taller than the Angel of the North. It weighs 60 tonnes and together the 547 nodes (the Meccano-like atoms that are pieced together to form the shape) combine 8,500 lengths of metal, requiring a further 6,500 or so angle joints.

All this for a figure that has been constructed in a crouching position. “If this stood up, it would be 100 metres high,” says a smiling Gormley. He is on his fourth visit to the yard where his work has been built, and he is plainly delighted with the result.

Exposure is not simply about being big. The main point is that the figure is porous and paradoxically insubstantial, insists the artist. It’s not “an iconic mass in space”, like that rusty flasher (as some disparaging locals call his Angel) beside the A1 at Gateshead. Instead, this work is “articulating space”, in a series of interlocking triangles, pentagons, rhomboids and 12-sided polygons. “I think of him as a constellation,” says Gormley. “You can think of these nodes as starbursts within the body. He is not struggling, he is simply contemplating the horizon, contemplating space at large, but he is himself space at large. It is not easily understood — you have to walk around it, walk underneath and even climb it.

“I’ve climbed up to its testicles, but not much further. It’s like a bridge or a piece of civil engineering. That notion may seem implausible, but from its very conception to its execution there has been a Victorian grandeur to the engineering task accomplished here . . . The smallest bit of it is the bit that’s closest to the ground, that is the complete reverse of the way that stable structures are made. It is a very remarkable alliance between science, engineering and a kind of creative form-finding.”

Five years ago, the design for Exposure was the winner of an international competition, organised in Flevoland, the most recent of the Dutch provinces, reclaimed from the sea in the 1970s. In September the piece will take its place among five other works commissioned on an epic scale, including Marinus Boezem’s Green Cathedral (a vast structure made from carefully planted trees) and Robert Morris’s Observatorium, a modern-day Stonehenge.

The work contrasts with other Gormley creations such as Event Horizon, which placed men on buildings, or Another Place, the 100 figures staring out to sea at Crosby. The abstract increasingly interests Gormley, and a year ago a second atomised work, Firmament, was installed at Jupiter Artland, a sculpture garden on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

These works represent an artistic shift, he says. “Usually in traditional art the body is either sexualised, politicised or idealised, and this is none of those things. This is the body as an open space, an open space of possibility. It is about human futures rather than memorialising human pasts.”

Exposure was a huge technical challenge. The cast of Gormley’s body was first photographed and there were years of computer modelling. The company Hadfab, whose fabricators stand in a huddle while the artist poses for pictures, has been active in the design and build process almost from the start.

Simon Harrison, its managing director, wears a look of amused tolerance. In an normal year his company would get by on commissions for electricity substations and pylon manufacture. When he first encountered Exposure, it was just a computerised wire diagram that offered no concept of depth and was nearly impossible to draw. In the end it took an inspired piece of innovation — a cleverly designed rotating jig — to enable the individual nodes to be constructed.

Gormley is excited by the result, waving at sightseers and joining a few admiring passers-by at the works gates. The job is done, he tells them, and this huge figure will soon leave Scotland for Lelystad in the Netherlands, where it will take eight weeks to reassemble.

“If this is a poorly veiled excuse for an act of extreme narcissism, well, that’s your opinion,” says Gormley. “The fact is I have made my entire truth play in the world on the basis that this is the body dealt with from the inside. I don’t honestly see it as my body at all. It’s just the form I choose to be used.” And in the case of Exposure, it is really, really big.

Writers name

Mike Wade, The Times 07-06-2010

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