Artist Statement
Firmament is a single 'expanded field' sculpture constructed from 1019 steel balls held in the space by 1770 steel elements of different lengths, welded together to create a non-regular, polygonal structure whose form dissolves and resolves in space.
Now, permanently on view in the sculpture park at the Jupiter Artland Foundation, Scotland, Firmament was originally installed in the below ground gallery of White Cube Mason's Yard for Gormley's solo exhibition of the same title in March 2008. Pressed against the edges of the gallery space, the installation, brought to mind an assembled matrix of volumes that map a celestial constellation while also implying the form of a body lost within it. Not a celestial body, but a real one made by scanning the artist's own body.
With its graphic outline the original installation, in a basement space with low light Firmament loomed over the viewer and at times felt claustrophobic. Now released from its architectural mould the work reads as a drawing in space through which the changing light of day and the landscape can be glimpsed. Gormley's work has always been about our sense of perception, testing what it feels like to experience our physical presence in certain conditions of time and space. In this new installation at Jupiter the work engages with the earth, trees and the distant pink bings. The viewer is asked to continually reassess scale and resolution as she navigates towards, beneath and through the work.
As Gormley expressed "The work is a way of activating the space that we take for granted in architecture. Everyone knows what it feels like being out under a sky at night, everyone knows what it's like to stand in an empty room. Can we join those feelings together and think about how our freedoms but also our imaginations are affected by those two conditions of space; the endless condition of space without objects, the sky and the conditioned space of architecture?"
Firmament has been engineered as part of a collaboration between Antony Gormley and Tristan Simmonds of the Advanced Geometry Unit at Arup.
Biography
Antony Gormley has over the past 25 years revitalised the human form in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation. "I am interested in the body", he says, "because it is the place where emotions are most directly registered. When you feel frightened, when you feel excited, happy, depressed somehow the body registers it."
Gormley has explored the relationship between the individual and the community in large-scale installations such as Allotment (1997), Domain Field (2003) and Another Place (2005). Angel of the North (1995/98), one of his most celebrated works, is a landmark in contemporary British sculpture. Field (1994), an installation of hundreds or thousands of small clay figures sculpted by the local population, has been enacted in various locations throughout the world, involving local communities across four continents. "Sculpture is an act of faith in life, in its continuity", comments Gormley. "We all do things like this; we have a stone that we keep in our pocket which is a guarantee of life's continuity, and it has to do with hoping that things will work out, that life will be okay."
Antony Gormley was born in 1950 in London, England, where he lives and works. He has participated in major group exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1982 and 1986), Documenta VIII, Kassel, Germany (1987) and the Sydney Biennale (2006). Solo exhibitions include Fundacao Calouste Gulbenkian, Lisbon (2004), Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, England (2003), and the National History Museum, Beijing, China (2003). He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, and has been a Royal Academician since 2003.
