Wednesday, 28 November 2007

Spirituality in Art

Antony Gormley is one the most famous British sculptors working today. He was born in 1950 in London and after going to university he travelled to India and the Middle East. These travels and his interest in Buddhism and subsequent meditation practice (he studied Buddhism and meditation for 3 years in India) awakened a passion for how artists use their work to express spiritual ideas and beliefs.

Gormley learned the importance of just "being" not always thinking or doing and has set out to create art that encourages people to contemplate, and be more 'aware' and 'in tune' with our environment.

'Just being' is something I find very hard to 'do'...or should I say 'be''– perhaps this is the life lesson I am learning at the moment as I struggle with a severe neck injury (Which I funnily, or not so funnily, got while doing a yoga class.) I have been in so much discomfort I have been unable to do anything and feeling quite sorry for myself. So sorry for myself that I re-watched the inspiring story of Mexican painter Frida Kahlo and reminded myself to get a grip. If you haven't seen the DVD it is a must see, re how, after suffering a crippling accident, told she would never walk again and being confined to bed for a great part of her life she began her artistic career and eventually got back on her feet - literally. She later went on to marry(twice) the very sensual and talented Mexican muralist Diego Rivera

One of Gormley's most famous and controversial sculptures is Angel of the North, which is located in Gateshead, England. Its wide-open wings greet visitors as they reach Gateshead by The AI road or east coast mainline railway.

Although the angel is a traditional image of western art, depicted in numerous paintings and sculptures, Gormley has recreated it in a thoroughly minimalist and modern way. Sculpted our of steel and standing 20 metres (66 feet) tall, with wings 54 metres (178 feet) - it is wider than the height of the Statue of Liberty.

The Angel of the North is as much a feat of engineering as a work of art. The sculpture has a greater wingspan than a Boeing 757, and has to be able to withstand winds of over 100mph. Due to its exposed location, 150 metric tonnes (165 tons) of concrete were used to create foundations which anchor the sculpture to rock 20 metres (66 ft) below.

The wings are angled 3.5 degrees forward, which Gormley has been quoted as saying was to create "a sense of embrace"

Construction work on the Angel started in 1994 and was completed in 1998. At first, Angel of the North aroused some controversy with local councillors and the British newspapers - largely due to the expenses incurred. The Angel of the North cost nearly £800,000 - which was controversial in a relatively deprived area of Britain. It has now come to be considered as a landmark for the North East of England and is one of the 12 official "Icons of England."

There is no doubting that Antony Gormley has created a powerful sculpture, which is seen and enjoyed by tens of thousands of people every day.

Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." 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." His work attempts to treat the body not as a thing but 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.

Antony Gormley's Quantum Cloud was commissioned for a site next to the Millennium Dome in London. At 30 metres high, it is Gormley's tallest sculpture to date (taller than the Angel of the North). It is constructed from a collection of tetrahedral units made from 1.5m long sections of steel. The steel section were arranged using a computer model with a random walk algorithm starting from points on the surface of an enlarged figure based on Gormley's body that forms a residual outline at the centre of the sculpture.
The sculpture was completed in 1999 in time for the opening of the Millennium Dome.
The idea for Quantum Cloud came from a comment about algebra made by Basil Hiley, quantum physicist (and long-time colleague of David Bohm), in which he said "algebra is the relationship of relationships". The comment was made during a conversation between Gormley, Hiley and writer David Peat at a 1999 London gathering of artists and scientists, organized by Peat.

I first stumbled upon Gormley's work in a book about sculpture and instantly fell in love with Angel of The North, and as I began to learn more about him and his work, I fell in love with everything he does. To me that is spirituality in art - the ability to inspire love and transport the viewer to a world far away from the mundane; a place where one can contemplate life's mysteries and the simplest of joys. Thank you Antony Gormley!