30
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, p.202
31
Nesbitt, Antony Gormley, p.19
Sculptors’, by the following example. You are using glasses to view a painting. By observing the painting, by contemplating the art, you automatically become closer to the art viewed than the glasses touching your face. While physically closer to your body at no point in the scene have the glasses entered into the dialogue of encounter between you and the painting. “Equipment” 29 influential in our perception and programmatic use of the spaces we occupy, the glasses cannot be considered spatial as they are not understood to create an encounter, a dialogue, with the space occupied. “To give an object poetic space is to give it more space than it has objectivity.” 30 The work of sculptural artist Antony Gormley occupies space in this dynamic. Using his own body as subject and focus Gormley explores our primitive and subjective being in space. The human body’s capacity to contain and be contained is the essence of Gormley’s work. Gormley studies both conditions of our being within and out with the protection of the body, emphasising the intimate privacy of our interior by its exposure out into the world. Gormley’s work explores an encounter with the ‘presence of absence’ through the process of creating a mould of himself. “You are aware that there is a transition, that something is happening within you is gradually registering externally... a moment of stillness, of concentration... I am trying to make sculpture from the inside, by using my body as the instrument and the material.” 31 Creating this moment of tranquillity in his method is integral to Gormley’s art. The stilling of the human body into a permanent structure, a composing of the inherent kinetic energy of the body creates a bizarre timelessness, provoking a reaction in the viewer, to stop, to consider. This encounter between movement and stillness, presence and absence, is emphasised by the inherent emptiness of Gormley’s sculpture. His art creates a second skin, an object out with the human body within which we may return to the latent enclosure and protection of womb-like space while simultaneously by its very being announcing an otherness. We are exposed out with the body and as part of a condition of a collective society. “I define myself in terms of what I am not, in terms of how I
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