Antony Gormley Talks About Making Space

For me, art is. . . about reasserting our first-hand experience

 in present time.

~ Artist Antony Gormley

British sculptor and Turner Prize-winner Antony Gormley, whose wonderful drawings and sculptures recently were on view at Washington, D.C.'s The Phillips Collection*, presented a fascinating and insightful talk, "Making Space", embedded below, at TEDGlobal 2012. 

During his presentation, Gormley talked about why he is a sculptor and his approach to creating art, which for him involves gaining accessibility to a "place of darkness" — interior space within the human body — a place of imagination and potential, endless, lacking objects, where it is possible to examine our relationship to space and time, to achieve and connect with "consciousness without an object, free from the dimensionful and measured way in which life links us to the obligatory."

To consider Gormley's questions — Can we map that space? Can we talk about the human form as an energy center? Is art about trying to imagine what lies beyond the horizon? Can we use, in a way, the body as an empty catalyst for a kind of empathy with the experience of space and time as [they are] lived?  — is to learn to look and see.

Gormley references several works in his talk, including Rearranged Desert (1979), Room for the Great Australian Desert (1989), Learning to See (1988-1993), Another Place (1997), the experiential, "radical" Blind Light (2007), which employs light and water vapor, and Vessel (2012).  

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* "Antony Gormley: Drawing Space", June 2 - September 9, 2012 (Installation shots are available here.)

Gormley's Two Times is on view at Hayama Museum of Modern Art, Japan, until March 2013.