Allison Glenn: You have had such an illustrious and long career as an artist. How has it shaped the way you live your life outside of the studio?
Antony Gormley: I don’t think artists have careers, really. They have a vocation, and they follow it, and it’s a long and winding path. I didn’t become an artist to be famous. I became an artist because I couldn’t be anything else. For me, making is a form of being, feeling, and thinking that I can’t live without. I think I’ve always had a need to physically engage with the matter of the earth, but I didn’t realize what form it could take. I think the materials themselves, or the affordances within materials, have shaped me entirely.
I can think of my early experiments removing or undressing a tree, one annular ring at a time, to reveal the tree inside the tree, or the adding of layers on top of already existing things, whether they be fruit and vegetables or industrially made, human-made things. Those early experiments were really about what the surface of things reveals or how the skin of the thing differs from its presence or substance. I think that the relationship between substance and presence is absolutely still pertinent to my continued itch to make things, whether it’s to do with revelation or insulation. I am always skeptical about simply relying on how things look. Trying to copy appearance has never been the challenge that I’ve wanted to meet. I wanted to think about what lies on the other side of appearance and I feel that I’m still investigating that as a possibility.
Glenn: Do you have any habits that prepare you for that investigation? Whether philosophical or technical?
Gormley: You’ve got to be careful of habits, haven’t you? Because habits can become unconscious. And in a way, what one wants is to have rituals or disciplines that don’t become automatic because they’re the same as preconceptions and assumptions. I want to keep my skepticism alive, so I would be very worried if habits were driving my skepticism.
Glenn: Well, perhaps there are rituals or processes? Something in your daily life that anchors and grounds you.
Gormley: I guess my morning routines. They were to do meditation before, and now they have more to do with maintaining the body. I exercise every morning, and that puts me back in my body. I often wake up from a night of dreaming, or broken sleep, and it is as if I’m putting my body on or reestablishing the body as the place where I dwell. It’s an organism that has its own autonomy, but it’s my spaceship, my vehicle, and my vessel.
Glenn: The pen is more precise?
Gormley: Yes, but that’s interesting because the drawings are anything but precise. I’m not trying to define an edge; I’m trying to define the place of an object rather than describing the surface of the object. It’s about attitudes and how they connect.
Glenn: I really appreciate how you talked about and reflected on your daily practice of meditation, and how that has shifted into moving and grounding yourself in the body, because your work is quite invested in bodies. I would like to follow up and dive into this through line, but I must first start by asking: What does sculpture mean to you?
Gormley: Sculpture is a thing in a world of things, but it doesn’t play the same game as most of the other things, which know how they fit in the world. A tree is rooted and, through the photosynthesis of its leaves, transfers light into substance and energy. All of the things that we share in our world, in our built environment, are, on the whole, functional. A sculpture doesn’t know how it fits in the world and refuses those functionalities. As such, it has enormous power.
Sculpture is still and silent. It resists, as it were, the use value that most things we share the world with have. I think a good sculpture uses its stillness and silence to confront us with our own freedom, and a really good sculpture uses its potential to make place, which means that it is synonymous with its context, and, in fact, its context becomes part of its content. Once it becomes a commodity object, it loses its power.
Sculpture is most powerfully evoked, I think, by the standing stone. This naturally made lump of mineral aggregation taken from its original context in or on or by the earth, once stood upright, becomes a marker in space that calls on our time. It calls on our precarity and the fact that we are here, in terms of geological time, for the blink of an eye.
When you are walking across a moorland in northern England and you come across this vertical finger inserting itself into the limitlessness of the sky—the spatial dimension of the cosmos—it immediately asks you to inquire into your own motivations and mortality. That’s what sculpture can do when it’s allowed to do it.
Glenn: You have stated that in your work you aim to “engage with our collective experiences of the second body and the Anthropocene,” which reminds me of the titular publication authored by Daisy Hildyard, The Second Body, where Hildyard introduces the concept of the “second body” as the collective, or larger, ecological and social systems that we inhabit. Hildyard’s argument is that, although distinct from the first body, or the individual, the second body is completely impacted by every decision made by the individual; essentially articulating the idea of the second body as an intertwined network of living things. How does your work engage with ideas of the Anthropocene and ideas of the second body?
Gormley: I think mine and Daisy’s interpretations of the second body are very distinct.
Daisy’s second body is the biosphere in which we are completely embedded, but, which, in the current state of high-density living, we are very distant from.
My first body is the biological body we are born into, and my second body is the built world. The fact is that we are now well past the point where half of our species lives within the urban grid. We’ve become totally dependent on technology, and our lives have become indistinguishable from the world that we have made, and that world has become more and more intelligent. We’re all dependent on our external brains. I would say my sculpture is a form of asking the question: Is this really what we want? Is not embodied firsthand experience—the immersion in the elements in the material world, the manifested animal nature of our existence—the very thing that is most precious? Is it not what allows us most potently to experience and interact with the greater-than-human world on which we totally depend, and from which we derive so much inspiration, life, and energy?
Glenn: I really appreciate that orientation and articulation of how the networked world we have built has removed us from the experience of really being. You have a real and deliberate interest in the body and one’s phenomenological experience, and you explore this in your practice alongside a real material investigation of site, specifically by often including minerals and geologic histories within the research and development of your work. How did this emerge in your practice?
Gormley: When I was a child, I was always burying things, wanting to see how direct immersion in the earth would change them. Burial and then resurrection, or hiding and finding, have been with me from very early on.
At about 10 years old, I did my first archaeological dig. I went to Fishbourne, which is in West Sussex, just outside Chichester in England—the site of a Roman palace occupied from the end of the first century to the third century AD. This was an amazing place to be for a young, curious child. I found a boar’s tooth, some fragments of red pottery and some tesserae from a mosaic. They’re still in a little basket that I had at the time. That memory can be physical, carried through objects embedded in the earth, has been with me for a long time.
I’ve always wanted to enter the earth, and so ever since school, I’ve been a caver. That interest in caving evolved into [me] becoming absolutely passionate about the whole history of cave painting and sculpture. You could say the history of sculpture, universal in hominid culture, has gone to the rock as the carrier of our feelings about life and its vulnerability. Whether it’s Homo erectus or Neanderthal, Cro-Magnon or Homo sapiens, we were tiny bands witnessing enormous herds, flocks, and shoals of vibrant life-forms that far outnumbered us. We respected them, we loved them, we were fearful of them, but we killed them in order to survive.
That relationship with the greater-than-human world, I think, has been maybe most powerfully expressed in the Chauvet Cave. But also think of those two deer in the Font-de-Gaume with the male stag bending down to lick the head of a female. That is one of the most touching images of affection and creaturely love in the whole history of art.
Glenn: To return to the relationship between your work and Daisy Hildyard’s work: She authored an essay called Landing where she reflected on Time Horizon (2024), your recent public commission of 100 life-size sculptures distributed across 300 acres of the Houghton Hall park in Norfolk. These sculptures are arranged at a constant height irrespective of topography, with most submerged within the landscape—which now makes me think of your inner child and that desire to bury things—while others teeter atop concrete plinths. In Landing, Hildyard introduces a fairly new term for me called solastalgia, which is “the grief or longing for a place that no longer exists,” different from nostalgia, which can be understood as a sentimental longing for a subjective past. In what ways might the term solastalgia align with your ways of thinking?
Gormley: Yeah, this is something that [writer and theorist] Mark Fisher discusses, too, in his concept of “hauntology.” Are you aware of Mark Fisher’s work?
Glenn: Yes, but he’s new to me. As new as this solastalgia term is.
Gormley: He calls it nostalgia for things that you have not experienced. You might take as an example the recent film about Bob Dylan. Dylan is still alive, but to many young people, the Z generation, that whole story about the Newport Folk Festival, even Woodstock, is a thing in the deep past, but for which they have enormous nostalgia for, even though they’ve never experienced it. And I think this is what Mark Fisher talks about as a kind of haunting. It’s the haunting appeal of areas of experience that are simply not available but have enormous power.
I wonder if people have a nostalgia now for the ’60s, when education, which is a basic human right, was both monetarily and conceptually free.
I feel guilty in the face of the present state of university education. I was given a place at Cambridge in 1968 and entered into a world in which every form of conceptual and physical experimentation was invited and encouraged. And now I feel that everybody’s fighting for a place in a late-capitalist world that they don’t really believe in, but feel that a degree is a significant survival tool.
Glenn: I have solastalgia for the Boomer experience because it actually looks so free.
Gormley: Well, I think that you know exactly what I’m talking about. When I came back from India in mid-1974, I immediately found somewhere to squat, invited my friends, and, within a year, we had nearly 30 artists working in an abandoned factory that we never paid a penny for. And we had a five-story, mid-19th-century house stuffed with friends and associates from my university years. Money was the last thing that we cared about. The combination we find today of false scarcity and false desire—the twin instruments by which capitalism enchants us into modes of living and working—alienates us from ourselves and then produces chimeras of our own lost experience. The cyber world, with Instagram and selfies, is the principal engine of this. Sculpture is an important antidote because it brings us back to real things in the real world that encourage firsthand, physical experience.
Glenn: I completely agree.
Gormley: That’s a shame! We can’t have a good old barney!
Glenn: Unfortunately, we are too aligned there! But, I’d like to turn back to your work and the impact of architecture on your practice and specifically through a particular work, The Model Room (1994–2013).
Gormley: That is The Model Room acquired by Tate, but let’s forget that one and think about the new room at the Nasher. Models are an essential part of the evolution of any sculptural idea and language. We make models all the time, and we will be sending a whole group of models to the Nasher that relate, mainly, to projects that have been realized or are in the process of being realized. Some we may find are so ambitious that they can’t be realized. It’s slightly weird to be sending the final models of finished works. It makes it seem fixed, but, in fact, the [experience] leading up to the final model is often a long and winding road identified by many models, which evolve and change as they go.
As I’m sitting here in the studio, there are models everywhere, on different scales. This one’s lost its arm. These ones are so small that they come in little plastic bags, but they’re very useful. They are so important because they are toys and they’re mutable. You can place them on the ground and find relationships that work. And they are the means by which change takes place. I would say the big leap is from the drawing or the scan to the physical thing, but that leap is enabled by the model. The model room at the Nasher will have lots of models at different scales and in different materials, as well as 180 workbooks.
Glenn: Are you introducing any site-specific works in this survey?
Gormley: Well, the Nasher was very keen for me to make a work for the garden, but the garden is quite full already, so I felt that we could use the garden simply as an observation space to look at downtown Dallas: the surroundings of the museum itself. Like standing stones, there is a remarkable forest of high-rises that were not there when I visited Dallas for the first time, in the ’90s. I want to allow people to recognize and feel that. I’m making this field of Domains specifically for Dallas. They’re completely new works made at life scale from 10-millimeter-square-section, stainless-steel bar.
Glenn: Some will be placed on the roof as I understand it, looking over.
Gormley: Yes, there’ll be one on one of the pillars that holds up the roof of the Renzo Piano-designed museum. That’ll be the closest to the viewer. As I speak now, we have a few other agreed-upon sites. The idea is that you go out having stumbled across some of my works in the museum, and then maybe your attention is drawn to this high-rise context. I’m hoping that, because of the nature of the way these things are made, the different facets of those square elements will catch the sun in different ways. You may not be able to see the work itself, but you will be aware of the reflection from the surface of the works that are at the top of a tower.
Glenn: Incredible. I cannot wait. Okay, my last question is more personal. Who are your influences?
Gormley: My influences are very wide. In terms of sculpture, I love those modernist pioneers, whether it is Brancusi or Giacometti. I follow Giacometti insofar as I question what happened to art in the 20th century, that in liberating itself from service to power and the representation of people of power, it went into a concern with form that then rinsed itself of content or richness of meaning: color for color; paint for paint; metal for metal. I would like to think that Giacometti’s turning against the formalism, or even the surrealism of his early works in the 1930s, in order to confront existence itself, is something that I am also trying to do.
The distinction between us is that Giacometti uses the ancient injunction of the artist observing the model through separation. Distance from the body treated as an object is at the core of Giacometti’s project. I have turned my back on that and turned it inside out by saying, What we have got to do is recognize the strangeness of that found object that we live within and make an account of it from the inside.
My journey has been in the darkness of the body, inquiring into the ageless, objectless condition of being. n
SURVEY: Antony Gormley is on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center until January 4, 2026, including public works installed around the museum. Look up!
Captions:
Thumbnail: Antony Gormley, Time Horizon, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK, 2024. Time Horizon, 2006. Cast iron, 100 elements. Each 74 1/2 x 20 3/4 x 11 1/2 inches (189 × 53 × 29 cm). Photograph by Theo Christelis
Hero L to R: Antony Gormley’s workbook, 2019. ; Antony Gormley, Event Horizon,?Madison Square Park,?New York, USA,?2010.? Event Horizon, 2007. 27 fiberglass and 4 cast iron figures. Each 74 1/2 x 20 3/4 x 11 1/2 inches (189 × 53 × 29 cm). Photograph by James Ewing, New York