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Lot 38 ‘What is an Insider? An Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body – attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture – to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate’ (A. Gormley, ‘Insiders 1999’, in J. Hutchinson, et al., Antony Gormley, London 2000).
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Perth International Arts Festival, Antony Gormley was commissioned to create Inside Australia (2003). The work comprises 51 sculptures, installed over an area of 10 square kilometres on the bed of Lake Ballard in Western Australia. An essential element of the concept was Gormley’s commitment to working within a community and with a specific location. By selecting the remote outpost of Lake Ballard and the community from the nearest town Menzies, Gormley was able to incorporate layers and threads of human history from the Aboriginal occupants, from pastoralism to the brief, but intensely impactful gold-mining era. The community that now remains all demonstrate the legacy of this history, as does the landscape.
Antony Gormley explains ‘I wanted to try to find the human equivalent for this geological place. I think human memory is part of place, and place a dimension of memory. The 51 works are positioned about 750 metres apart; wherever you are positioned within the field of the work there are tiny, hair-like verticals hanging from the horizon. Viewed in the heat and sharp light, they constantly draw you to the edge of your perceptual field.
The pieces are life-size in height but are digitally shrunk by two-thirds in the horizontal dimension. There is something in the way that people stood while being scanned that is transferred in this process of concentration. The works are like tuning forks which allow one to see an implicit attitude that is normally hidden by the accidents of appearance. The core set of the body is revealed; a concentration in mass of the darkness of the body.
I was trying to achieve the highest level of tension between mass and space with highly concentrated and individualised body forms distributed sparsely across this chemical surface. Inside Australia is installed on the western end of Lake Ballard in Western Australia. The horizon is flat for most of its 360 degrees. There is an ironstone mound 120 feet high that allows a vantage point from where you can see for over 30 kilometres in any direction. As people move across the work, they leave a tracery or drawing of connecting lines between the works across the sharp whiteness of the lake. This is a sign of the viewers' participation in the work which changes, as does the sky, throughout each interval of the year’.
In 1997 Gormley began to create a series of cast-iron figures, which focused on producing body structure in its most concentrated and contracted form. As Martin Caiger-Smith notes ‘[the Insiders] at first sight, have something of a studied intensity of Alberto Giacometti’s emaciated bronze figures, but they are based on a particular and programmatic process of making. Each Insider figure derives from the vital dimensions of a human body – first the artist’s and later with the Inside Australia …those of a whole community. The resulting figures, which comprise one-third of the real body’s mass, not only present the physical core of the body but also, in the artist’s view, reveal a sort of emotional concentrate, a sense of the body’s attitude, strange yet still recognisable. This is not the skeleton; it is the energy of the living figure at its most contained’ M. Caiger-Smith, Antony Gormley, London, 2010, p. 73).
THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Perth International Arts Festival, Antony Gormley was commissioned to create Inside Australia (2003). The work comprises 51 sculptures, installed over an area of 10 square kilometres on the bed of Lake Ballard in Western Australia. An essential element of the concept was Gormley’s commitment to working within a community and with a specific location. By selecting the remote outpost of Lake Ballard and the community from the nearest town Menzies, Gormley was able to incorporate layers and threads of human history from the Aboriginal occupants, from pastoralism to the brief, but intensely impactful gold-mining era. The community that now remains all demonstrate the legacy of this history, as does the landscape.
Antony Gormley explains ‘I wanted to try to find the human equivalent for this geological place. I think human memory is part of place, and place a dimension of memory. The 51 works are positioned about 750 metres apart; wherever you are positioned within the field of the work there are tiny, hair-like verticals hanging from the horizon. Viewed in the heat and sharp light, they constantly draw you to the edge of your perceptual field.
The pieces are life-size in height but are digitally shrunk by two-thirds in the horizontal dimension. There is something in the way that people stood while being scanned that is transferred in this process of concentration. The works are like tuning forks which allow one to see an implicit attitude that is normally hidden by the accidents of appearance. The core set of the body is revealed; a concentration in mass of the darkness of the body.
I was trying to achieve the highest level of tension between mass and space with highly concentrated and individualised body forms distributed sparsely across this chemical surface. Inside Australia is installed on the western end of Lake Ballard in Western Australia. The horizon is flat for most of its 360 degrees. There is an ironstone mound 120 feet high that allows a vantage point from where you can see for over 30 kilometres in any direction. As people move across the work, they leave a tracery or drawing of connecting lines between the works across the sharp whiteness of the lake. This is a sign of the viewers' participation in the work which changes, as does the sky, throughout each interval of the year’.
In 1997 Gormley began to create a series of cast-iron figures, which focused on producing body structure in its most concentrated and contracted form. As Martin Caiger-Smith notes ‘[the Insiders] at first sight, have something of a studied intensity of Alberto Giacometti’s emaciated bronze figures, but they are based on a particular and programmatic process of making. Each Insider figure derives from the vital dimensions of a human body – first the artist’s and later with the Inside Australia …those of a whole community. The resulting figures, which comprise one-third of the real body’s mass, not only present the physical core of the body but also, in the artist’s view, reveal a sort of emotional concentrate, a sense of the body’s attitude, strange yet still recognisable. This is not the skeleton; it is the energy of the living figure at its most contained’ M. Caiger-Smith, Antony Gormley, London, 2010, p. 73).
THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
Antony Gormley (b. 1950)
Inside Australia Prototype (Simon Jones)
Closed26 June 2017
Price Realised
GBP 167,000