Sculpture exhibition gets physical

(Interactions, September 2007)

Sharon Ann Holgate finds a surprising amount of physics in Antony Gormley's sculptures.

If you visited London's Southbank over the summer, you might have noticed some unfamiliar additions to the city skyline - 31 life-size figures created by the sculptor Antony Gormley had taken up residence on walkways and rooftops. Gormley is probably most famous for Another Place, in which similar figures look out to sea from Crosby Beach near Liverpool, and for the gargantuan Angel of the North outside Gateshead.

Every figure was part of a work called Event Horizon and they faced Blind Light, the exhibition of Gormley's works taking place at The Hayward Gallery. As I approached, my childish delight at spotting these new guardians gave way to a worry that someone might call the police, terrified a weary Londoner had finally snapped after one tube delay too many.

I love the fact art can provoke responses like these. During my PhD I was secretary of the Young Friends of Pallant House - a centre for modern art in Chichester - and I've been an avid gallery-goer since. Visiting Blind Light was going to make me forget about writing my solid-state physics textbook, surely?

         Entering the exhibition I was confronted with Space Station - a collection of 480-odd cubic metres of steel plate boxes that make up the rough shape of a human body and which Gormley claims is a model for Stephen Hawking's vision of a habitat in space. It was imposing, overwhelming and scary. Shift II was a figure pinned to the wall "as if held by a centrifugal force", according to the exhibition guide. It also quoted Gormley explaining that he had taken the term "event horizon" from cosmology, the idea being that, just as we will never see parts of the universe, viewers of the rooftop figures - which were arranged over a 1.5 km² area around the gallery - would question whether there were more figures beyond those visible on the horizon.

Science was the means by which the centrepiece of the exhibition, also called Blind Light, existed. Thanks to clever environmental control, it was effectively a cloud confined in a room, and made for a disorientating sensory experience. However, as a physicist I was more interested in Drawn, a room with each corner occupied by an iron figure made from a cast of Gormley's body. The pose struck was arms above the head and legs akimbo at 90°, so that the limbs could lie along the axes of the corners. In the exhibition book Gormley says that he wants this work to make the viewer "more uncertain about his or her position in space and gravitational value". Seeing human forms "sitting" quite happily on the ceiling certainly does give you a strong sense of not knowing which way is up, but for me the figures were like the atoms at the corners of a unit cell. Suddenly I found myself standing inside the very thing I was trying to get away from, but I was loving it. My fascination with the structure of solids had been reborn.

The forms within forms of the Matrices and Expansions collection of hanging works were, not surprisingly, inspired by geometry. Viewing from many different angles revealed a human figure trapped inside each stainless-steel doodle of polyhedral outlines, picked out by a denser arrangement of the wiring. Quantum Cloud, which is on permanent display at Greenwich, has the same idea. This and other works not featured in this exhibition, such as Meniscus, Critical Mass, Cell Cycle III and Chromosome, take titles or ideas from science. I will be interested to see what other links this multifaceted mind will produce in the future.

Another work in the exhibition with a physics connection was Capacitor - a figure made from thousands of steel tubes, some containing rods which protrude from the body, creating a voodoo-doll like structure. The body at the centre of the piece is, according to the exhibition guide, "a core at the centre of a field, but it is not clear whether this is expanding or contracting; a big bang or a black hole". I began to realise Gormley might have a large collection of popular science books.

        While laughing at the ludicrous but inspired Mother's Pride - a wall of slices of bread that reveal the shape of a curled up person via half-eaten slices - I also mused on the problems that art conservators are likely to have in the future. I later read that Mother's Pride was made at the height of the Cold War and is one of a range of pieces created from materials that we might use to protect ourselves from, or to survive, a nuclear attack - a much less palatable link to physics.

It was enjoyable clambering round and peering inside the works - so different from the passive gazing that we normally do. Outside the gallery I held the hand of one of the Event Horizon figures. It felt strange. All of these body forms are made from casts of the artist's own body, so I was, in a way, holding Anthony Gormley's hand - the hand of a man I'll probably never meet.

The works described here can be viewed at www.antonygormley.com

© Institute of Physics 2007. Reproduced with permission.