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FAQ answered by Antony Gormley |
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The idea is to install one hundred iron body forms over a hundred and fifty square kilometres of high Alpine landscape.
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| Alpine Environment: |
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the great thing about the Bregenzerwald is its remarkable diversity: high, flower strewn pastures, unique gypsum craters, deep forests, silver streams and waterfalls that flow from permanent snows. This vast bounty of natural delight is enjoyed by a wonderfully wide range of people: hunters, walkers, skiers, climbers and bikers. It manages to be both very wild and yet open to the most varied activities and sophisticated contemporary winter sports. |
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| 2039 meters above
mean sea level: |
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I was looking for a level that was above the tree line and mediated between the domestic and the infinite. It was neither the inhabited valley floor nor the peaks where only climbers go. |
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| The body: |
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is as important now as abstraction was in the beginning of the 20th century, a vehicle for common experience. Why use a body? Because everybody has one. |
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| One hundred: |
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a unit of mechanical production, easily multiplied. The work is industrially made, acknowledged by the 8 ingates and risers on the surface of the cast, something that was made in a factory. |
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| Iron: |
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concentrated earth, go down far enough from the surface of this planet and you will find this material which gives it its magnetic field. Its density is what keeps us on our trajectory through space. These objects are connected to the earth not simply by being bolted to it, but also by being made from it. The fact that they oxidise and bleed like we do is important. |
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| Touch, See, Imagine: |
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this is the syntax of the work. It would be silly for somebody to think that it was a good idea to see every one of the hundred pieces: rather you are immersed in a field that connects three aspects of consciousness. The palpable; that which you can kick, kiss, touch, the perceivable; that which you cannot touch, but which is somehow part of your visual world and the imaginable; founded in things that you can touch and see, but which goes beyond the empirical. |
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| Nature: |
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it is significant that we expect art to live in museums, a dependency similar to a body in a hospital. Art can be in life, open to all, like a tree, a mountain or the sky. |
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| The big question is: |
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where does human culture fit in the elemental world? The degree to which art has become part of the urban experience and the degree to which it has become immersed within institutions that mediate our experience is the degree to which it has become both limited and a specialization. To discover human nature in nature, we can no longer continue with a lazy dialectic between nature and culture where culture sees itself as distinct from nature. Art can be open and in the open. |
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| Experience: |
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we have to recognise that our bodies are not our own, they are on temporary loan. We have only a short span of consciousness where we can connect the palpable, the perceivable and the conceivable. Because of its stillness, silence and inertia perhaps my sculpture can make your thoughts, feelings and free movement more present and felt and perhaps Horizon Field's emptiness will allow people to feel their own aliveness more intensely.
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