The Art Fish : Antony Gormley

Watched a really good documentary the night before on this artist and wanted to write a few things down about it for my own memory's sake. I find his work very compelling and the film quite inspiring as it spans a lifetimes' exploration on the idea of how a body and a body's sentience occupies a space. Gormley has in his latest works, moved into an abstraction of this interpretation from the figurative object; to the figurative translated into a space that makes the occupier the object.

The documentary brought up some really great quotables that have stuck in my mind with regards to context of work and how one informs the other. A segment (≈ 37:30) sees Gormley installing a new work on Lundy island for the Landmark Trust, where he says quite poignantly

" This bit of headlands has been here hundreds of thousands of years and now it's got a foreign object on it..."
" It's got to have that sense of it being, in a way, an irritation - but then at the same time , it's got to own its place" 

and most notably :

"... The test of a well sited work is, during the time that it's there you can't think of the place without the object or the object without the place"

The world of SL is on one level a sculptural landscape in which everything that exists within its "space" is hewn from the mathematics of 1's and 0's and yet its physicality is only "felt" in a visual way. For me, this is where the idea of how this visual space may in theory be ported into tactile reality via printing, is an intriguing and worthy notation for further exploration.

What is virtual also sits in that uncomfortable space of ephemerality. I think as humans we take comfort in constants and mark making that it is hard to grapple with the transient. In this, the world of words, images and digitized information is the strange frontier; yet how human is it to still be asking the same questions today that still echo those questions asked before...

New Scientist (What is reality)

Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)