Antony Gormley
Inside Australia
Hugh Brody
Anthony Bond
Shelagh Magadza
Finn Pedersen
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| ‘Hauntingly beautiful’ | | – The Sunday Times |
Under the searing heat of the Australian sun, British sculptor Antony Gormley stepped onto the surface of a vast, million-year-old salt lake in one of the remotest parts of Australia. He was there to install a remarkable art work that would stretch over ten square kilometres and consist of more than fifty sculptures.
It was the final act in an exhausting six-month process that had seen him take naked body scans of the residents of a nearby town and produce ‘Insiders’ – alien-like sculptures of the inside of each person – which he was about to place across the flat salt-encrusted expanse of Lake Ballard, Western Australia.
Now drawing thousands of visitors from all over the world to its remote site, the work is stunning in its effect. Huge in scale, it remains intensely intimate; standing still and silent, the ‘Insiders’ appear and disappear across the exposed and desolate landscape.
Inside Australia tells the whole story of the work’s creation, from Gormley’s receiving the permission of local Aboriginal elders and his persuading the people of Menzies to take part, to the hazardous casting and back-breaking installation of the sculptures. Photographs, maps and drawings show the entire process in detail, while commentaries from members of the project team explain its different stages. Anthropologist Hugh Brody recounts the various human histories that lie like so many layers on the land around the lake, while curator Anthony Bond places the work in the wider context of Gormley’s sculptural oeuvre.
Antony Gormley has, since the early 1980s, used his own body to make sculptures that explore the human experience of being in the world. He is perhaps best known for his monumental sculpture The Angel of the North, in Gateshead, England. He won the Turner Prize in 1994 and his work has been exhibited extensively around the world.
Also of interest:
At Home in Australia
Aboriginal Art
Deserts of the Earth
Song of the Earth: European Artists and the Landscape |
|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500512620 | | ISBN-13 978-0500512623 | | | | 24.0 x 20.0 cm | | Hardback | | 176pp | | 206 illustrations, 118 in colour | | First published 2005 | | | | £24.95 | | | |  | | | | 
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