Antony Gormley’s Field to come to Torre Abbey

By PRSD, on Sunday, December 14, 2008

posted by Cptn

Antony Gormley is something of an icon. And his Field exhibition – which is down in Devon next summer, when 40,000 clay figures will cast their gazes across Torre Abbey – is made up entirely of icons, made by people themselves.

“Take a hand-size ball of clay, form it between the hands, into a body surrogate as quickly as possible. Place it at arm’s length in front of you and give it eyes.” These are the instructions for making a figure for Field.

Field is a bold statement about humanity, image and possibly even exclusion, but bold statements abound from Gormley, not least his idea that public art is a bit, er, rubbish at the moment – an insight he shared with the Independent back in March.

“So much of the art of the 20th century has ended up being corralled into museums. I would love to see more significant work in public spaces that is not institutionalised – work that is truly everyone’s. There are works that really challenge you that maybe you don’t understand at first but you keep going back to see them because they niggle. But art placed in public spaces that does not challenge does a disservice,” he told them.

Most famed, probably, for his Angel of the North (presiding over the A1 with impunity) or Iron:Man in Birmingham city centre (a pod-like creation that has dropped to earth), it was Field for which he picked up the Turner prize back in 1994. And it’s Field which will be arriving in the Bay this summer for an exhibition at Torre Abbey.

According to the Tate Liverpool Gormley: “Uses the human form to explore man’s existence in and relation to the world.”

From his own web site, Gormley says of Field: “From the beginning I was trying to make something as direct as possible with clay: the earth.

“I wanted to work with people and to make a work about our collective future and our responsibility for it. I wanted the art to look back at us, its makers (and later viewers), as if we were responsible – responsible for the world that it (the work Field) and we were in. I have made it with help five times in different parts of the world.”

At different times Field can look like an angry Lilliputian mob ready to rush you, or a streaming mass of sorrowful emigrées. Either way there’s a certain Jiminy Cricket about them, like a silent collective conscience.

There is a proviso that wherever it’s shown Field should be free, and maybe it’s because the work does niggle (it accuses, condemns and eventually consoles) that it needs that free access. But then shouldn’t all art take us on that journey, and shouldn’t that challenge be a civic duty?

From his website, this is what Gormley says about the makers of the clay figures of the Field, he says: “It was important that it was through the repeated action of touching, forming, placing apart from the body and making conscious, that each person found their own form. The extraordinary thing was the distinctiveness of the forms that were found.”