Antony Gormley Insiders 2003

The work of Antony Gormley provides us with important insights into some of the most compelling and radical changes that have occurred in modern sculpture and even to major changes in the way we think of representation in art.  Artists such as Antony have quietly shifted the emphasis away from making images of things in the world towards generating experiences of their presence.  These experiences may or may not involve images of the things themselves and may simply provide us with a trace or residue of the thing.  Minimalism may have provided a conceptual platform for the idea of material that creates its own presence, however a younger generation have turned Minimalism�s literalism upside down by mining this presence for its affective and metaphorical potential.

Two outstanding effects of this shift that further undermine the nature of autonomy of the artwork are the incorporation of site into the material meaning of the work and openness between the artwork and its active beholder. While modern market conditions might seem to dictate portable and self-sufficient objects, many artists working with three dimensions have perversely moved in the opposite direction towards site specificity. 

The other important shift has been away from completely autonomous art objects whose meaning is supposedly inherent in their form and therefore closed to continuing imaginative work, towards an art that finds its completion in the experiencing mind and body of the viewer.  The work of Antony Gormley dramatically embodies these changes.   In 1980 Gormley made two works that importantly marked out a way of thinking about the body in art; not looking at a body but inhabiting the space of the body.  Not so much representation of, but affinity with the body.

Room was a temporary architectural installation that was also a trace of corporeal absence.  Gormley systematically cut his entire bodily coating from above the soles of his shoes, his socks, and trousers to shirt and pullover into thin strips.  By knotting these strips together he made one length that he then wound around four posts to create the space of a room.  The body had been texturally expanded to become the room; to enter it would in a disturbingly intimate way, be to enter the space of the artist�s body.  The absence of a door however ensured that this remained an imaginary occupation. It is not unusual for clothing to invite imaginary disclosure just as it patently conceals, but perhaps here it is more a question of finding empathy with the body of another because it is a space or absence rather than a presence.   We imaginatively project ourselves into the space rather than looking for the absent artist, we might wonder what it would feel like to be in a room that was determined by the shell of another body?  We traditionally think of architecture as clothing the body and classical architecture is suitably predicated on the proportions of the body.  When we enter such a building we feel at home or at least we feel the space of the building acknowledges us while we can empathise with the prior occupation of others. In this work Gormley announces his interest in exploring the nuances of meaning woven into these relationships.

Bed was an equally intimate and performative work.   Gormley made two piles of bread the size of a double bed and proceeded to eat the volume of his own body 'out of the bread', at the same time making the negative mould of his own body.   In creating the image of his body he actually consumed himself, communing with his image, he hid himself within himself.  It is difficult to stand in front of this piece and not imagine the inside of a body and to think about the experience of eating your own volume of sliced bread.  Once again Gormley is inviting empathy between the viewer�s body and that of another through the traces of a process.  This is not about the image so much as about imagining the feeling of being a body.   He is finding ways to bypass the representation of the body in favour of something more directly felt. 

Gormley's pre-occupation with corporeality dates back to when he was a student of Anthropology and took a unit of art history choosing the task of piecing together for the first time just how Stanley Spencer�s "Church House" would have looked had he kept all the work together and succeeded in building the architecture to house it.   It had been Spencer�s dream to build a church based on the plan of the village of Cookham where he grew up and where he ended up painting so much of his later work.  This spiritual space was to have been modelled on community life where the sacred rooms also reflected daily routines and where the bodily sacrament of sex sat alongside the transcendental sacrament of Holy Communion.

Eating the body of Christ is to be filled with the spirit; in this sacrament the body is both actual flesh and a spiritual sign.  The spiritual moment is symbolised by the most carnal act.  When we commune with God by eating his son we participate through a literal enactment, an extreme act of empathy called communion.   There seems to be something here that has more to do with the way Gormley�s art works.   It is not representational or at least it is not to be read as mimetic.  It is providing the house or space for an act of communion.

Stephen Bann has spoken about some recent sculpture including Gormley�s lead body casings as participating in a kind of �ontological communion�.  He has taken Hans-Jorg Gadamer�s phrase out of the context of the religious icon and applied it to sculpture that seems to work as a trace or as an absence that excites our empathetic bodily response.   Gadamer�s point was that the religious icon was the exemplary image in painting because by definition, it could not be a mimetic representation (Seraphim do not sit for their portraits).  There must therefore be some other relation between image and its object that he described as ontological communion.   Gormley clearly creates works with iconic value, as distinct from representational iconography, what could be more iconic than the Angel of the North?   These figures avoid likeness to individuals just as medieval icons do and like them they are free of the particular and thus project a more metaphysical power as objects.   It is in this sense that the apparent contradiction between iconic object and objecthood is reconciled.

It was a small move from the impression of the body in Bed which took the form of a two-piece mould and the following works in which lead was hammered over a cast of the artist�s body to create a hollow shell.  It is perhaps these works that most obviously reflect Bann�s idea.  Gormley has jokingly referred to these lead figures as �Gormley perdu� a reference to the lost wax casting technique.  There is an existential edge to this joke however because we are only ever given the trace or the evidence of his passing perhaps as the result of some kind of transmutation, as if these cases were discarded shells like those of insect pupae. 

From the beginning Gormley had these works photographed in the landscape and sought opportunities to have them permanently located where they could be understood in relation to specific architecture or the land.  This is no mere romantic impulse but comes close to the core of the work.  Gormley has made use of the horizon in a number of works including Land Sea and Air 1982 and Another place 1997 where the figures are set against the sea and sky and The Angel of the North towers into the sky like a celestial messenger.  I do not think this is an accident; these figures are indications of being in the world at the brink of the void.   They convey the feeling of sites where consciousness has risen up out of the earth and their absent occupants may be thought of as having moved on like the moth that leaves its chrysalis and flies into the sky. 

The body and the landscape are intimately bound together even though modern man lives in a totally fabricated environment, he needs the view from the window into a sense of space.  In the end it is always the land that supports life and it is to the land that the body returns when consciousness passes on.   It is an important part of Gormley�s project to find ways of placing his figures in the natural or built world so that they draw strength from the nature and spirit of the site while reciprocally lending the place a new kind of significance.  It could be argued that this has always been an important element in the sculptural project but it has become more expressly stated by artists working with site specificity and particularly within the landscape since the 1960s and 70s. 

In 1977 Walter de Maria created The Lightning Field at Quemado New Mexico.   He installed 400 highly polished stainless steel rods in a grid a mile long and a kilometre wide.  This field of conducting rods attracts electrical activity to produce a spectacular field of lightning.  It is probably one of the best-known public artworks in the modern world and is visited by thousands of people who have probably never heard of Minimalism, Conceptual art or Land art as such.   This popularity attests to the power art can harness when it reveals natural forces and space, imaginatively connecting bodily and spiritual feeling.

At Documenta VI, 1977 de Maria installed another more discrete work but none the less one that focuses an enormous amount of energy, Vertical earth kilometre.  A kilometre of brass rod was sunk down into the earth as a vertical column.   All that shows on the surface is a plaque with the top face of the rod showing.  Standing there knowing that this conducting rod is pointing down to the centre of the earth below our feet creates a tangible intensity.   Joseph Beuys wore iron shoes when he wanted to be connected to the energy of the planet and felt soles to insulate himself.   One of each set up a flow of energy within his own body.  How much more energy is physically and metaphorically stored up in this kilometre of metal. 

This work introduces the question about what we need to know in order to fully appreciate the effects of an artwork.   We tend to think that an exemplary work reveals itself to the senses and thus to the intellect with no external references, however this is not quite how experience ever happens.  Antony wants his figures to be self sufficient which in a way they are; and yet there is an extraordinary history of ideas and associations with any site in the real world let alone the symbolic association with gesture that makes the works instantly partake in a web of ideas that enrich our experience the more we discover them.

Richard Serra may come as close as any artist to inducing pure unmediated sensation.  The way he sometimes concentrates energy through the simple presence of massive slabs of steel.   Twenty tonnes of steel hammered into a cube of approximately one metre not only reveals the once fluid state of the metal and the vast force of the industrial hammer that beats it into shape but it also creates such a density of matter that its magnetic field actually makes the hairs on your neck tingle.  To walk inside one of Serra�s spiral steel plate structures is to experience immense spatial compression and disorientation.  It produces a similar effect to the almost unbearable physical thrill a child experiences alongside the thundering immensity of a steam engine.  Already of course my description is beginning to make associations with lived experience and this is the dilemma for the purist of sensation.

Converting the viewer into an actor is another important aspect of this kind of sculpture.  This performative aspect of Minimalism was first articulated by Michael Fried in Art and Objecthood as a negative critique of its theatricality but writers such as Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster later turned around his arguments.  Hal Foster's article, The Crux of Minimalism provides the clearest statement of the presentness of the object and the value of an art that engages the viewer's presence in its completion.  The works of Serra and de Maria are not just for looking at but need to be engaged with somatically and imaginatively.  But it is not always necessary for the artwork to be monumental to achieve this sense of bodily engagement.  Carl Andre has made a series of metal plate compositions including Venus forge 1980 at Tate Modern where different metals are arranged in squares of various dimensions.  These are laid on the floor with the expectation that the viewer will walk over them.  There is of course an immense inhibition that most of us feel at walking on an artwork.  After all there are many floor-based installations that are destroyed by being walked on or even near.  The tension of walking or not walking is a strong element in determining the viewer�s concrete presence in the space and their connection with the work. 

By contrast with Carl Andre�s metal plates we might consider an installation at the Friedman Gallery in London Untitled 1999 by Rivane Neuenschwander.  Onto the parquet floor of the gallery the artist had meticulously sprinkled thin lines of white marble powder to exactly cover the cracks between the wooden blocks.  This fine and labour intensive installation covered the entire floor except for a narrow passage round the outside edges of the room framing the work.  Walking around the floor drawing, one becomes intensely aware of the fragility of the material, a misplaced footstep or for that matter a sneeze would prove fatal for the whole installation.  Neuenschwander's fragile sensibility confers great responsibility onto the viewer underlining their commitment to the work. 

Anne Hamilton is another installation artist who often works with the floor strewing it with material that rustles or crackles underfoot.   Works by these artists make the viewer very conscious of their own presence as a part of the installation and of their potentially destructive power or complicity in the realisation of the event that their presence initiates, as if with every viewer the work is remade.  Such works deliberately highlight the presence of the viewer and their self-consciousness of being with the work.  It is an installational equivalent of Jasper John's strategy with his number paintings.   The heavily crusted impasto numbers in encaustic and metallic paint suggest some monumental purpose or content, yet on close inspection they prove to be devoid of any logical significance; they are just motifs.   Deprived of any reading, the viewer is thrown back into awareness of 'the process of their looking' as Ian Burn put it, 'looking at seeing not reading'. 

This history of presence has largely been non-figurative with the viewer providing the living animation to it.  The background to this has been the relative difficulty of a realist treatment of the body in twentieth century art.  As Modernism unpicked the conventional purposes and means of representation, the body underwent all kinds of fragmentation, such as distortion in the name of expressivity or the analysis of representational means as in Cubism.  In the wake of this dismantling of appearance, abstraction seemed for a while the only way to deal with the metaphysics of presence, with the exception of Surrealism that dealt more in dreams than the real; but it was Surrealism and Dada that introduced traces of real life in the form of found objects preparing the way for Minimalism and subsequent artistic strategies. 

Gormley is one of the initial artists to successfully return to the body in sculpture.  All non-photographic representations of the body after Modernism are problematic, however sculpture is more difficult than painting as it occupies real space with its material presence. Sculptures are objects in the world as well as indicating some other, not present thing.   The way forward as shown by the Minimalists was to converge the sign and the referent thereby eliminating this awkward duality.   The price they paid was the metaphorical dimension of art that is its most enduring instrument.

Gormley�s success is in large part due to his intuitive explorations of the kind of presence initiated through Minimalism that bypasses the nature of representation while recapturing the possibility of metaphysical references to culture, and above all to the experience of the body.  His works function as trace and invocation of the body and not necessarily its likeness.  The body is not distorted here except as a function of the process of its production.   The lead casings paradoxically gain their auratic quality through the absence that the casings signal, not through likeness of that which in fact they obscure, i.e. the absent body over which they were formed.

Gormley acknowledges the history and atmosphere of the site where he is working.  Sound II 1986 is installed in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral.  The figure stands in water since the crypt is more often than not, flooded.  The description of this work is lead and water rather then the normal lead and air.  The figure stands with head bowed absorbed in a pool of water held in its cupped hands.   It immediately brings to mind the magical pool in which the seer can travel over distance and time.   In 1997 he installed Another Place consisting of 100 cast iron standing figures in the shallow tidal flats near Klugelbake on the German coast.  These figures all face out to sea.   They are not walking out to sea, just standing as sentinels; not holding back the tide but witnessing its advance and retreat.   Their eyes are fixed on the horizon, that boundary between the known world and what lies beyond the limit of human sensibility at the meeting of sea and sky.   The figures seem to be contemplating their place in the world between matter and mind here at the edge of the world just like Caspar David Friedrich�s Monk by the sea c. 1809.

It was to the land that Gormley turned when in 1989 he came to Sydney to install A field for the Art Gallery of NSW at the Art Gallery and to locate a reciprocal work in the desert, A room for the great Australian desert. He requested a site with 360 degrees of uninterrupted flat horizon and red dust underfoot.  I located a spot where I knew that the clay pans were extensive and the horizon was terrifyingly flat and low.  Standing up there you are the highest object this side of the horizon.   It is a vertiginous experience as if you could easily fall from the spinning globe.  It was while camping out in this place that Gormley talked to me about Heidegger and the phenomenological problem of consciousness that always rests so lightly upon the material world out of which it has arisen and yet is always constructed as its Other.  There could be no more dramatic and appropriate place for such speculations and for an artwork that embodies them.

The work Gormley made for the Art Gallery in Sydney was a field of 1,100 little clay figures made from the red bull dust of the centre.   The figures were arranged in two hemispheres mimicking the plan of the brain, with a pathway down the middle to a central lobe when you stand.   From this vantage point you become aware that all the figures have eyes focused directly on you.  I immediately responded to this mass gaze with guilt felt on behalf of mankind that has so badly bruised the land out of which it arose.  Others claim to feel godlike.   Perhaps both are appropriate; to judge is to be judged after all. 

Back in the desert Gormley positioned a concrete body housing.   It was designed to exactly house his own body within its cubic form.  The figure has a powerful presence in the land even though there is no one to see it.  The station manager tells me he has seen it from the air but not visited the site.   What Gormley anticipates is that creatures of the desert, spiders, crickets and lizards will have reanimated the hollow form.  He has made a number of these architectural suits since then, some of them designed to precisely fit the individual measurements of members of a community.  With this and other works like it Gormley has shifted from the singularity of the artist�s figure to a position that bears witness to a collective body.  

When camping out in the desert one comes across places that feel comfortable and welcoming.   This is not to do with any known human history and only in part due to topographical and climatic features.  An outcrop of rock can have caves on either side and they may be completely different in atmosphere.   One side may even be rather terrifying with an atmosphere of foreboding while a few meters away an overhang beckons you inside and provides comfort for the night's sleep.   The extraordinary thing about the �good� cave is that it always has evidence of multiple occupations of thousands of years of cricket and bat droppings, kangaroo and other marsupial traces that are completely missing from the �bad� cave.  The Chinese have codified something of this in Feng Shui but all sentient beings seem to have intuitive responses to particular spaces.  I suppose the success of Gormley�s A room for the great Australian desert might be measured by the number of insects that have chosen to animate its interior.

There are undoubtedly many logical factors involved in this history of choices that also explain the atmosphere of the space.   The body responds very strongly to space and atmosphere and this is a crucial component in the most interesting recent sculpture, just as it has been in the siting of sacred monuments such as the standing stones of the British Isles or for that matter, the choice of a particular tree or rock for a Shona tree shrine in East Africa and trees that are sacred to particular Aboriginal communities.  It may also be possible however to generate the energy required to create such a place through sheer mass or through focus of energy as for example with Walter de Maria and Richard Serra. 

Inside Australia is part of a series of works that seek to decentre the focus of energy from the artist as subject or even as model for a figure and to engage in a more communal and collaborative project.    This series can be thought of as having its origins in the groupings of body casings but they were always traces of the artist in various manifestations or stages of the unfolding drama.  It was probably with The Field works that the break comes, not only did the figures become ideations rather than traces of the artist�s own body but their forms were roughly made in response to the hands of the many people who helped make them and thus form traces of these others.   These works were also decidedly masses of figures and not individual markers of space.   The romantic figure on the seashore was replaced by the masses that surge up from the earth to populate the world.  Gormley badly wants to take his place in this throng helping to give it a voice. 

Since then other bodies have played an important role even in the more architectural pieces such as Allotment 1996 where the cubic casings for the bodies were not based on his own body but on the measurements of members of a local community who volunteered to take part.  These works depend on a rigorous mathematical extension of the body from the organic to the cubic while other works make the figure into the absent core of an apparently non-human form. 

The Insiders seem to reverse the concept of a body casing that contains a void indicating its absence.  The process is similar however, and depends equally on a direct relation between the body and a system of measurement.  It is this systematic dependence on tracing the real that determines the authenticity of the work and continues to convey an uncanny sense of the body's presence. The first of the Insiders was produced using a mechanical system of templates to reduce the mould of the body to 30% of its original mass.  While this process changes the appearance and form of the body even making it strange, it is a rigorous procedure rather than an expressive gesture.  Our affective response is to the thing itself as a corporeal response to experiencing the body's exterior becoming interiorised. 

Subsequently Gormley has adopted CAD scanning techniques to reduce the mass of the body parts while retaining the vertical dimensions and the width of the hips and shoulders.   The tips of breasts and penises also seem to have retained their distance from the core (spine?) thereby forming elongated shapes in the same way that the limbs are distorted.  This reduction has nothing skeletal about it, nothing literal in fact since the condensed forms bear no visual relation to the superficial appearance of the body's form.  In spite of this they suggest a core feeling of the body in question, they excite the sensation of internal strength, a secret space to which the individual might withdraw, they also capture the characteristic movement of individual bodies.   They are precise portraits of real individuals and despite the extreme contraction of the forms the sitters seem to be able to recognise themselves. 

Inside Australia employs this computerised technique of reduction but of equal artistic importance is his commitment to working with a community and with a specific place. Lake Ballard is a remote location and one with a very particular history that is described elsewhere in this book.  Aboriginal occupation has been interrupted by pastoralism then displaced by goldmining and today the mines still exist but the once thriving towns have shrunk to tiny communities of casual workers and there is little work for the remaining Aboriginal people.  The goldfields are a wild place to visit.  Vast flat expanses of semi desert have been denuded of indigenous plants and wild life by the introduction of imported livestock.   Occasional 'breakaway' ridges of sandstone, ironstone and tough stunted bushes that grow in the red dust relieve the flatness.  Quartz chips that glow in the moonlight punctuate the redness and occasional reefs of mica shimmer like broken glass.  There are itinerant prospectors and occasional casual employment brings strangers from far away.  Pastoral use has shrunk to a fraction of its original strength; stations are isolated and often run by one manager and his family if he is lucky enough to have one.  This is a harsh climate and territorial rights are regularly enforced at gunpoint.

This is the unlikely place that Gormley came to make friends and to produce a portrait of the community that would put the people back in the landscape.  It might be that this work could be thought of as a kind of restitution, it brings all sections of this community together in a common project, placing them back into the landscape together and eliminating the outward signs of difference while maintaining their individuality.   Gormley successfully negotiated the collaboration of 58 potentially unsympathetic inhabitants of the area and in the process brought disparate people together.  It is an attractive possibility to contemplate art as healing and yet there is something melancholic, even lost about the figures and nothing is ever that simple when you engage real histories and real places.  It may be best to describe the experience of a visit to the site since an important part of this work is the difficult journey we must make to find it, the impact on us of that journey, the sense of discovery when we arrive, the people we meet and of course the extraordinary feeling of the space itself.

Menzies is the town nearest to Lake Ballard; 150 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie, which is the biggest centre in the goldfields and has an airport with regular commercial flights.  Kalgoorlie still has a frontier feel to it and a few minutes drive out of the centre the bush very quickly takes over.  There are occasional signs for goldmines by the road and some of them are visible as great slag heaps and tangles of corrugated iron buildings. Menzies would be easy to miss; there are few buildings left which are spread out amongst the gritty waste.  The main street is also the highway north and this short street retains a dim trace of past glory. The Menzies hotel and the garage are the two remaining businesses while over the road are the modest but charmingly historic council buildings.   Looking at the pub it is possible to see how it has seen greater days.  Menzies was once home to 30,000 people with quick money to spend; today you are lucky to see five or six in a day.

When I arrived at the hotel, the only place to stay in town, there were about that many people in the bar, some of them had come in from outstations and decided to stay the night after a few beers, and others were locals.  Three of them were Aboriginal, one ran the local community centre, another drove the grader for Council and the third I never quite worked out, but it was getting late.  I did not disclose my interest in Gormley but began a casual conversation about the sculpture out on the lake.  Not only were all of them, including Keith our host, keen to talk, they were all adamant that the work had to stay there.  When I asked what people made of it they said that the longer it stayed the more people would identify with it and come to have their own stories about it.  They were also proud that the visitation to the town had risen from a handful in a week to as many as ten people in a day at weekends.  Many of the visitors had come from Europe and of course all had stayed at the pub.  In spite of the large building and the small number of people, our accommodation was in containerised temporary cells out the back near a mobile ablutions block.   It must have been an interesting experience for our foreign visitors. 

I set out for the site at 5.30am in order to catch the sunrise, which is Gormley's preferred viewing time.  It is a 40-minute drive in daylight but missing large grey Kangaroos that bolt across the road in front of you in the dark made it more like an hour.  There is a designated parking area back from the site itself, a very good idea, as cars parked along the lakeshore would break the spell.  I was relieved to see no one else had made it at this early hour because I had a romantic desire to be alone at this first encounter.  There is a sign at the car park advising that we take at least 5 litres of water with us, always wear a hat and never venture out alone - too late for me now!   It is necessary to approach the lake on foot because this prepares you for the scale of humanity in relation to the great outback.  In my case it also involved an encounter with one of the giant goannas that frequent this prehistoric landscape.  The lake first appears as you climb a shallow rise, it is a large expanse of white saltpan with a small conical hill named Snake Hill at the centre of the vista, Gormley has ensured us a perfect approach to the site.

From a few hundred metres away you can already detect one of the figures against the whiteness near the hill.  As you approach the lake itself you begin to see the rest of them stretching out as far as the eye can see.  Some 100 to 200 metres or more separates them from each other although there is no obvious pattern to their spacing.  Unlike the coastal works in Europe these figures are not all gazing out to into the lake but stand about randomly disposed.  In the early light of day their shadows stretch out forever.  The lake reflected the colours of the sky turning shades of pink and Parma violet.  This effect was enhanced because it had rained recently and the lake had been temporarily flooded.  While the waters had thankfully retreated sufficiently to allow me to walk out on the reforming salt crust, half a kilometre out there was a skin of water possibly one or two millimetres thick covering the salt shimmering brilliantly in the raking dawn light.  Unfortunately however it did not permit me to walk all the way out to the furthest figures 7 kilometres away. 

From a distance the figures seem very natural like real people in the landscape.   It is possible to recognise a characteristic pose for each individual.  You read the pose rather than the detail of the figure and it is only as you approach that the formal reduction of the figures becomes apparent.  The effect of their reduction produces a very strange sensation; there is something very naked about them.  They have an uncanny presence, something unhuman and yet they carry with them something intensely personal to the "sitter".  Whereas Giacometti's figures are monumental and a little impersonal, reflecting the vision of the artist rather than the original model, these are strangely vulnerable and are not distanced by the artist's gesture.   Giacometti's reduction of the figure to a slender linear form is expressive of the artist's vision and uses no systematic proportional system.   The surfaces are very rough revealing the soft clay and the hand of the artist who reduces the figure to this strip of flayed flesh.   By contrast, Gormley's figures have smooth surfaces articulated only by the procedures of mechanical reduction so that they have a direct relationship to the real figure while not mimicking its appearance.   In this way they are akin to the lead figure cases - they are a real trace of the thing itself and not a contrived or expressive manipulation of nature.

The two optimum viewing moments are dawn and dusk when the light quality transforms the figures.   The steel figures seem black against the salt during the burning light of midday but change to reflect the sunset and sunrise almost seeming to radiate a red or purple glow at these times.  I returned before dusk to find a number of people had gathered there in small groups, no more than two or three together, spread out over the lake that had dried significantly since morning.  The temperature had risen to the upper 40s by the time I left and must have been fierce all day.  Snake Hill provides a magnificent elevated view over the landscape and from there you can see the entire lake and realise the full extent of the installation.  From a distance it was sometimes hard to distinguish the living from the 'insiders'.  It seemed to me as if all of us living and otherwise sharing this space were all lost in our own thoughts. 

This installation may be the portrait of a community in its place but it has a universal dimension as well.  The experience of being amongst these figures in the lake engages our own sense of scale in the land, it bridges the gap between the conscious mind of the human as possessor and master of the world with a truer and more intuitive feeling of being with it.  This is a grand scenario and yet the impact of the landscape is not that of the awesome sublime.  In spite of the harshness, the heat, the blinding light of midday and the vast void of the salt lake, Gormley brings us to a momentary experience of belonging, not to the goldfields but to the earth.   We stand not so much on the brink of the void but at the point of absorption, where consciousness merges into material where mater 'mother' is the root of the word.  The salt of the lake, residue of the recycling waters, is a powerful reminder of our own bodily composition as evidenced by a crust of salt that was forming over my brow.

Anthony Bond