Artist Research
As my works is closely focusing on the ideas of humans bodies and i am creating bodies with my own, Anthony Gormley’s work is very instresing in how he uses the human figure within his art.
In Gormley’s work he investigates the human body and space, a lot of his work involves nature, I wanted to look at his work for more detailed inspiration as I had already started making casts of my own body before I found out that he makes some of his work by casting his own body. In my project I was mainly focusing on full bodies. Unlike some of Gormley’s work where he will cast parts of his body and put them together with a beam to make them seem whole.
quotes from websites
‘Increasingly, in the early 1980s Gormley was drawn to examine questions of humanity in relation to the environment. He made his first whole-body casts for Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage in 1981. As he continued, he varied materials and positions (crouching, standing, kneeling, lying down), sometimes distorting the human figure (as by elongating the arms) or replacing human features with other objects (as by putting a cast beam where the head should be). As gallery goers paused to examine the sculptures, they themselves seemed to be both the observers and the observed.’
Antony Gormley | Biography, Art, Sculpture, Angel of the North, & Facts | Britannica
Above is a quote I got from the Britannica about Gormley’s works and especially about his first body cast and his journey through them. Although I have been focusing on whole body it has crossed my mind to do body parts of half a body. His works is about the human body not as an object but as an experience and a place. Below is a quote about the meaning of his art found on wiki but is his words.
quotes from websites
‘Gormley describes his work as “an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live.”[10] Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or “the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside.”[10] His work attempts to treat the body not as an object, but as a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical – a trace of a real event of a real body in time.’
This shows how he is trying to experience the human body in another way and like he is trying to understand its concept more rather than its biological presents, this could be the same for someone wanting to put art on their body or to change it in a way to make them feel more themselves. The idea on how he wants to explore the body and he uses his own makes me relate to his work about how I have tattoos to explore my body and grow myself and feel more myself.
There is a lot within this video about his works and how he makes them, I found this so interesting. Although I have made a lot of casts and I am using string, unlike how he is using mode rock, I was interested in seeing how he creates his casts as I have cut myself while making them. In all fairness he is creating them in the same way as I am. After seeing how he has used the Modroc and that it will create a much stronger sculpture I will start to experiment with using it to create a cast, I feel it will also be a quicker process.
The next step I want to take within my project is I want to look at using Modroc for parts of my body, then use these to develop my idea with having the fake flowers on the string. I might see if I can grow flowers in them as it will hold soil better but also have some holes and see if I can grow the flowers in an organic messy way to show self growth.