Sonia Boyce
A practice irreducible to a single medium, time period, or voice
DOMINIC EICHLER How have you kept your faith in art?
ANTONY GORMLEY I keep asking myself: what is sculpture good for? I keep asking because there is no single answer, and it is constantly changing. In our time, art has been commodified and institutionalised. We live in a global culture in which everything is instantly consumed and then rendered obsolete: visualised, made, shared, and forgotten. But I hope art is still a place of refuge and resistance against becoming instant consumers of our own thinking and feeling. For a work of art to be situated and have some claim on truth, it must be alive to this state of affairs. It is important to distinguish what I do from a merely reactive position in relation to the political condition of the human world. I hope my work is an act of grounding – of saying something about what I can really know: being. Boldly put, life is the thing to which one has to attend with as much love and focus as possible, despite all the noise, confusion and distraction that surrounds us.
DE Your upcoming solo exhibition “Geestgrond” at KMSKA, Antwerp, takes its title from the evocative Flemish word for the fertile sandy soil that the last Ice Age left in its wake. I understand that the exhibition will address our position in the natural world.
AG It would be good if we felt more like plants – if we recognised the distributed intelligence of plants as a model of being that might help us to be less cause-and-effect obsessed, less goal-driven. The exhibition’s curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, sees her own evolution in art as linked to the story of the Italian Arte Povera movement and artists such as Giuseppe Penone. We share a mutual interest in how, in the wake of the puritanism of American minimalism, to work again with the potential of sculpture and organic materials and structures. The show will include, for example, the sculpture Attend (2025), a human space in space described as an organic matrix yet built on an orthogonal principle – a filigree work that has very little to do with anatomy or the relationship between bone, muscle and skin, and much more to do with a rooting system. What I am proposing is a way of being that does not privilege the cranium over the rest. I am constantly trying to look at the human animal, but not solely on our own animal terms. Even inanimate substances, such as calcium carbonate, express intelligence in their self-organisation. The whole body is a sensing place, a sensing instrument. Let us nourish the idea that the human project is still part of a larger creative project. All life is intelligent, and that intelligence is distributed through an endless system. The whole of the biosphere is an interlinked, entangled lifeform, and we have been fooled into thinking of technology as the sole carrier of progress. Genuine progress might lie in accepting our place within this distributed matrix of thoughtful being.
DE In Antwerp, beneath a fresco, the room-filling sculptural installation Orbit Field (2025) will directly address the viewer’s body and their navigation of space. As an intervention, it recalls the work of artist Richard Serra (1938-2024), but also a contemporary notion of interaction.
AG Yes, but compared to Serra, my work is lightweight! [laughs] Orbit Field III was first shown at Galerie Rudolfinum in Prague in 2024 and then at Museum SAN in the Korean mountains last year, but in a different configuration. The work is propped against the walls and linked to itself, making a thicket of hoops that you have to duck and dive through or around. My work doesn’t so much colonise as activate space – and in activating space, it activates you. You have to move in certain ways and become aware of your own movement through this intervention. I would like to think there is an invitation throughout the Antwerp exhibition to make connections between the works, but that each one will allow you to think and feel differently. Even as you move around, I hope you will feel your own being in that space differently – feel images rather than read them, as we have been taught to do. But the drive towards the hermeneutics of representation is so strong. It is quite possible that the exhibition may not affect people in the way I hope. We will have to wait and see. Every exhibition is a test site, a test of the art and of every viewer or participating intelligence that comes into contact with this particular gathering of displaced objects. Museums are hospitals for objects that have lost their place.
DE Matter is all atoms, sub-particles and the space between them and therefore, in a sense, sculptural. In quantum understandings of the cosmos, the observer plays a key fixing role. Are your figurative sculptures witnesses?
AG I really appreciate that word, ‘witness’. Everything is energy, and everything is movement at the Planck scale. Wave-particle duality is, I think, a reinforcement of ancient intuitions – the notion that all palpable reality is an illusion, that everything is becoming and nothing is fixed. My body works touch on different aspects of the felt condition. The ‘Strapworks’, for example, relate to how indistinguishable we are from our built environment and how dependent we are on it. The recent ‘Double Blockworks’ are a reflection on what makes society: it is only through relationships with others that we begin to know ourselves and discover the possibility of community. They are also an acknowledgement of our dependency on the earth. The ‘Bunkers’, like Corner II (2022) in the exhibition, are about interiority – the idea of an unknowable inner darkness.
DE Thames and Hudson have just published a major new monograph dedicated to your daily drawing practice. Is it a view into your personal artistic bunker?
AG My drawings are very personal – like play, or adventure. I need them to tune in to what is going on. I only really discovered this at my 2019 Royal Academy exhibition in London, where two ‘Cosmic’ drawings hung beneath a large sculptural work called Matrix III (2019) in the biggest gallery. They remind me of neutron stars or events that occur in deep space and deep time. Those two small drawings changed the invitation of the work as a whole; they puncture certainty.
DE There is a palpable acceptance of flux and impermanence in your drawing. They appear like visual meditations on embodied consciousness, intimacy, and transformation.
AG I want them to be immediate. I don’t want any virtuosity in them. I want them to acknowledge their own materiality – the materials used are very much part of what they are about: discovering how a material behaves, the trace it can leave, the kind of mark it can make, whether that is earth, milk, semen or blood. They are not about making a picture. Some are purposefully diagrammatic; some are fluid. Many were made at night on my kitchen table or in a stable in the Lake District. I want them to be tentative. This is not a drawing towards a known end. One drawing shows somebody digging a tunnel. The tunnel becomes a register of the body’s movements and the extension of the arms, as well as an enclosure that allows the body to become aware of its insides. I may not be describing it well, but there is something in that image of carving a hole that contains the body that allows the body to understand itself as a container.
DE What does it feel like to be cast? I understand your partner, the artist Vicken Parsons, worked closely with you, applying the plaster-soaked scrim to your body. For me, this gives the work an extra layer of both performativity and ritual. Are the cast-based works also addressing what each viewer might project into the hollow space within?
AG The body is a place of transformation. I think of the lead body works as empty things waiting to be imaginatively and empathically inhabited. Through perforations in the work, such as holes at the mouth, anus and penis, you are invited to think about that space removed from view: the darkness of the body. For me, the body works are about what it feels like to live on the other side of appearance. When you are being moulded, you have constructed a cave that is absolutely coequal with your bodily limits – a kind of enforced experience of entering that sublime place of limitlessness, an infinitely expandable space without objects that exists within your consciousness in the body. It lies in all of us, and yet we spend so much time escaping from it.
Recently, I did my first full-body mouldings again after twenty years, for the exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas at the end of last year. Being cast is claustrophobic, painful and capable of inducing panic. But if you overcome all of that, something else becomes available: you are released into a place of immense liberty. In the Anglosphere, the Christianised world, we are taught to think of darkness as the opposite of light, as negative, bound up with hell, diminishment and pain. I really don’t think that is true. This space, which we can access so easily simply by closing our eyes, being still and relinquishing goal-driven activity, is a place of immense power, possibility and liberty. My early cast work entailed a certain amount of self-imposed discomfort, but that is not its subject. It is the price you pay to make a body into a place that has gone beyond pleasure and pain to somewhere more open.
The attraction for me of Buddhism is that it offers a way of using your existence to examine existence. And that’s what I’ve tried to do. I’ve tried to make sculpture an instrument for examining existence.
DE Nakedness is a key signifier in your work. And in this respect, a salient detail of your family’s history drew my attention. In the 1930s, your mother’s family was German immigrants, weren’t they? I ask because German-speaking cultures have a different history and attitude toward nudity than in Anglo-Saxon countries and the US, and I suspect this resonates in your work.
AG During the Second World War, my German grandfather, Walter Brauninger– Vati, we called him – had to remain in Hamburg while my grandmother, Omi, emigrated to the UK with my mother. The Nazi party knew that his daughter had married a British officer, and so they stationed two SS officers in his apartment. The family story is that he did not speak for three years. He refused to talk to them at all. My German grandmother was significant to me. She encouraged me to draw and paint, but also to think and feel. My mother became a physiotherapist and was a devoted callisthenics practitioner. She studied with Auguste Rollier in Switzerland. In the early years of the twentieth century, before the Nazi period, there was a genuine movement towards realising bodily potential – dance and nakedness in nature were part of it. It was the opposite of the armoured man that German sociologist and writer Klaus Theweleit describes.
DE That brings us to your seminal work Critical Mass (1995), which you repositioned in an evolutionary line in the garden of the Musée Rodin, Paris, in your eponymous 2023 exhibition there.
AG Critical Mass II (1995) is an anti-monument. The violence within the human psyche has not gone away. The act of witnessing is an acknowledgement of the constant tension between our creative impulses and our destructive ones. I first showed Critical Mass II in an Austrian railway station, where it carried clear connections to the Holocaust and to the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau.
DE Did the figurative turn in post-minimalism also relate somehow to the televised war in Vietnam? I am thinking of the work of Paul Thek and Bruce Nauman as well.
AG When I first came across Nauman’s work, which was probably when I was at university, I thought he was the joker of the pack. But I now recognise that he absolutely nailed it. He was the Samuel Beckett of the minimalists, and understood that making structures which in some senses had to become architectural or furniture-like was a way of avoiding the existential. Like Nauman, I am interested in asking: what does it feel like to be alive?
DE Perhaps it’s a slightly awkward question to ask a figurative sculptor whose work can be found on most continents in cities and nature alike, but considering the contemporary critique of the Anthropocene, what relation do your sculptures have to their surroundings?
AG When you think of the built world as the materialisation of power, I am keen to embody our powerlessness and show our complete dependency on all the systems that surround us. We are neither the masters of the world nor its most singularly advanced lifeform. The whole of life is the most developed lifeform, and we are a small part of it. In a time when we are beginning to recognise this, that is what art is for – and it is a bigger cultural question than we perhaps acknowledge. I am very keen to make work for the birds, the fish, the bivalves. The large-scale outdoor work I make could be read as a sign of hubris and megalomania. But I see it as an offering back to the elements – a human-made thing at a scale we would associate with civil engineering, with the building of an airport or a bridge. It is an imaginative object that asks a question, but asks it of the very elements that support us. Placed in the sky, the sea and the land, it poses an open question: where do we belong in all of this? Are we simply an interference pattern? I want to open the space in which art might sit as wide as possible, so that we see ourselves in something approaching a geological context. I am trying to reassert our utter dependency on the earth, our acceptance that we are fragile, fugitive, that we have only a very short moment of consciousness, which is the very thing that gives us all these illusions of power.
DE I admire your negotiation of scale and sensibility. What have you been working on recently?
AG I am working on Innercity (2026), a multiple body-building installation for Galleria Continua in San Gimignano, Italy, consisting of fifteen works made from cardboard that you can pass through as well as between. I am excited about the cardboard. I have just completed a work in the middle of the mountains in northern Mexico. There are seven cast iron ‘Blockworks’ there, lost in nature. They have been photographed in the early morning as the mist rises: aliens in that natural world, carried far from our urban-animal space. For me, the dialogue is between the trees, the air and these forms that are a kind of future shock. This is a dystopian warning. The way we are going, we will not be contributing to the evolution of life on this planet for very much longer, because we do not seem able to stop business as usual. This is far beyond a dialogue with recent art history – nothing to do with that. It is more of the fossil model. Will the work become a marker for whatever lifeform replaces the biosphere as we now know it? We will leave behind real fossils of hominid bones from all periods, but there are bigger things to witness, and perhaps bigger forces of witness. We are in a time when we know how much we do not know, and how small we are in the ever-expanding cosmos. This may be hyperbolic, but I believe that sculpture can become a point of reference, a lever through which this still and silent thing might allow you to register your living, feeling potential. It is not about what it is; it is about what it allows you to be, in the relationship it holds to what it is not. For me, this is what makes sculpture, in an image-based world, so vital and so critical a tool for understanding, and perhaps accepting, our position not as masters of the universe, but as a reflexive part of its emergence.
<This interview is from Issue Ten>
Related Stories
A practice irreducible to a single medium, time period, or voice
Making of a Moment
Henry Weverka and Jonathan Laib offer an intimate exploration of Asawa’s enduring impact.
Moving in Time
A Pioneer of Korean Art
Condition and Continuum
