Within and Without
"This is a work called 'Room for the Great Australian Desert.' It's in an undefined location and I've never published where it is. It's an object for the mind. I think of it as a 21st-century Buddha. The darkness of the body, now held within this bunker shape of the minimum position that a body needs to occupy–a crouching body. There's a hole at the anus, penis level. There are holes at ears. There are no holes at the eyes. There's a slot for the mouth. It's two and a half inches thick, concrete with a void interior. Again, a site found with a completely flat 360-degree horizon. This is just simply asking, again, as if we had arrived for the first time, what is the relationship of the human project to time and space?"
~ Antony Gormley, from "Sculpted Space, Within and Without," TED, June 2012
Legendary sculptor Antony Gormley riffs on space and the human form. His works explore the interior space we feel within our own bodies -- and the exterior space we feel around us, knowing that we are just dots in space and time.
"Here is a box filled at one and a half atmospheres of atmospheric pressure, with a cloud and with very bright light. As you walk towards the ever-open threshold, you disappear, both to yourselves and to others. If you hold your hand out in front of you, you can't see it. If you look down, you can't see your feet. You are now consciousness without an object, freed from the dimensionful and measured way in which life links us to the obligatory. But this is a space that is actually filled with people,disembodied voices, and out of that ambient environment, when people come close to your own body zone, very close, they appear to you as representations. When they appear close to the edge, they are representations, representations in which the viewers have become the viewed."
Blind Light, Hayward Gallery, London, 2007
See also: "8 mind-bending sculptures from Antony Gormley"