The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published by Winchester Cathedral with photography by Joe Low. The card has a divided back.
The Crypt and the Statue
One area of the Winchester Cathedral which is constantly under threat on account of the weather is the crypt.
The low-vaulted stone crypt was created during the earliest phase of building Winchester Cathedral back in the 11th. century. The colossal vaults from the early Norman era were constructed close to the cathedral's founding in 1079.
Despite extensive remodelling over the centuries the crypts remain intact, although they are frequently subjected to floods. During heavy rainfall, and especially during the wetter months of the year, the rooms flood, leaving an ethereal sculpture located in the vault partly submerged.
Created by renowned sculptor Sir Antony Gormley, "Sound II" is figure made of sheets of lead. Based on a cast made around Gormley's own body, the final statue stands with its hands out front in a begging pose.
There is a tube mechanism through the body towards the arms. The cupped hands mean the figure can often be found holding water captured during the flooding, which is caused by the high water table and the well inside the crypt.
The figure is similar to Gormley's other works of solitary metal figures that, even when installed in groups, express a sense of peace and isolation.
The statue was installed in 1986, and was one of Gormley's earliest works. Visitors to the cathedral can see the sculpture as part of the admission fee.
As of 2024, Winchester Cathedral is open Monday to Saturday from 9am to 5pm and on Sundays from 12.30pm to 3pm. Crypt tours are available Monday to Saturday at 10.30am, 12.30pm and 2.30pm.
Antony Gormley
Sir Antony Mark David Gormley OBE RA, who was bornon the 30th. August 1950, is a British sculptor. His works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the north of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998; Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool; and Event Horizon, a multipart site installation which premiered in London in 2007, then subsequently in Madison Square in NYC (2010), São Paulo, Brazil (2012), and Hong Kong (2015–16).
-- Antony Gormley - The Early Years
Gormley was born in Hampstead, London, the youngest of seven children, to a German mother (maiden name Brauninger) and a father of Irish descent. Gormley has stated that his parents chose his initials, "AMDG", to have the inference Ad maiorem Dei gloriam – "to the greater glory of God".
Gormley grew up as a Roman Catholic living in Hampstead Garden Suburb. The family was wealthy, with a cook and a chauffeur, and a home overlooking the golf course; Gormley's father was an art lover.
Antony attended Ampleforth College, a Benedictine boarding school in Yorkshire, before reading archaeology, anthropology, and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1968 to 1971.
He travelled to India and the Dominion of Ceylon/Sri Lanka in order to learn more about Buddhism between 1971 and 1974.
When Gormley returned to England, and inspired by his time in India, he made one of his first artworks, Sleeping Place, by laying a plaster-soaked sheet over a friend. Its hollow plaster shell hinted at the form of a body, and recalled the people Gormley saw asleep in India wrapped in saris or dhotis.
After attending Saint Martin's School of Art and Goldsmiths in London from 1974, he completed his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art, between 1977 and 1979. Gormley's work as a student used natural materials such as stone and wood.
-- Antony Gormley's Career
Gormley's career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1981.
In this exhibition, Gormley showed a series of works that were concerned with surfaces, skins and inner structures, such as Natural Selection, a ten metre row of objects, including tools, fruits, weapons and vegetables, encased in lead, and Room, an enclosure reminiscent of a barbed-wire fence made from a set of the artist's clothes.
Gormley then turned his attention to the human body, creating moulds of his own body in plaster that he would then encase in lead. These works, such as the three-part sculptures Three Ways: Mould Hole and Passage and Land Sea and Air II, as well as the single body-case works Plateau, Night and Peer, attempt to investigate the body as a space.
In Gormley's words:
"How to make bodies into vessels that both
contain and occupy space? The early three-
piece lead works are the first works in which
I used my own body.
I was trying to map out the phenomenology
of the body and to find a new way of evoking
it as being less a thing, more a place; a site of
transformation, and an axis of physical and
spatial experience."
Throughout the 1980's, Gormley's lead body-cases were extended, suspended, sealed, pierced and also doubled into two joined forms.
Gormley describes his work as:
"An attempt to materialise the place at the
other side of appearance where we all live."
His work attempts to treat the body not as an object, but as 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.
In the 1990's, the hollow body-cases became solid, with Gormley casting the work in iron to create masses that displace space.
One of these works, Critical Mass II, was installed in an old tram storage station in Vienna. Comprising 60 life-size sculptures, all presented in a variety of positions and poses, the work has been described by Gormley as:
"An anti-monument to the
victims of the 20th century".
This work has since been exhibited in a variety of countries and contexts, each time reconfigured in response to its environment.
The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured Gormley's Asian Field, an installation of over 200,000 small clay figurines crafted by around 300 Chinese villagers in five days from 100 tons of red clay. Some figurines were stolen.
Also in 2006, the burning of Gormley's 25-m high The Waste Man formed the zenith of the Margate Exodus.
Other collaborative projects include Clay and the Collective Body, Inside Australia, Domain Field and Gormley's ongoing Field works, including Asian Field, Amazonian Field, American Field, Field for the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Field for the British Isles.
In 2007, Gormley's Event Horizon, consisting of 31 life-sized and anatomically correct casts of his body, four in cast iron and 27 in fiberglass, was installed on top of prominent buildings along London's South Bank, and installed in locations around New York City's Madison Square in 2010.
Critic Howard Halle said that:
"Using distance and attendant shifts of scale
within the very fabric of the city, Event Horizon
creates a metaphor for urban life and all the
contradictory associations – alienation, ambition,
anonymity, fame – it entails."
In July 2009, Gormley presented One & Other, a Fourth Plinth commission, an invitation for members of the public, chosen by lot, to spend one hour on the vacant plinth in Trafalgar Square in London.
This "living art" happening initially attracted much media attention. It even became a topic of discussion on the long-running BBC radio drama series The Archers, where Gormley made an appearance as himself.
Throughout the 2000's, Gormley has interrogated the relationship between the human body and architecture, notably in his series of steel and iron "Blockworks". In these works, Gormley replaces anatomy with architectural blocks that recall the built environment.
In March 2014, Gormley appeared in the BBC Four series What Do Artists Do All Day? in an episode that followed him and his team in their Kings Cross studio, preparing a new work – a group of 60 enormous steel figures – called Expansion Field. The work was shown at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern.
In May 2015 five life-sized sculptures, Land, were placed near the centre and at four compass points of the UK in a commission by the Landmark Trust to celebrate its 50th. anniversary.
They are at Lowsonford (Warwickshire), Lundy (Bristol Channel), Saddell Bay (Scotland), the Martello Tower (Aldeburgh, Suffolk), and Clavell Tower (Kimmeridge Bay, Dorset). The Dorset sculpture was knocked over into Kimmeridge Bay by a storm in September 2015.
On the 6th. September 2015, Another Place marked the 10th. anniversary of its installation at Crosby Beach in Merseyside. Gormley commented:
"I'm just delighted by the barnacles! Every
time I'm there, just like any other visitor,
you're encouraged to linger a bit longer
seeing the tide come in and how many
of them disappear.
And then you're encouraged to linger
further until they're revealed again."
In September 2015, Gormley had his first sculpture installed in New Zealand. Stay is a group of identical cast-iron human form sculptures, with the first installed in the Avon River / Ōtākaro in Christchurch's central city, and the other sculpture installed in the nearby Arts Centre in early 2016.
In 2015, at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence, Gormley presented a group of cast iron works that acted as points of ″acupuncture″ throughout the historical fortress.
Gormley returned to Florence in 2018 with the exhibition Essere at the Uffizi Gallery. The exhibition featured both historical and recent work, notably Room from 1980, Sense from 1991 and Passage from 2016.
In 2017, Gormley curated Inside, an exhibition at the Southbank Centre, London, presented by Koestler Trust showing artworks by prisoners, detainees, and ex-offenders. In addition, he judged their annual category prize, also on the theme "inside".
Gormley then held the first solo exhibition at the newly remodelled Kettle's Yard in Cambridge, England. Two new bodies of work, known as Rooters and Polyhedra Works, were shown that year at White Cube in Hong Kong and Thaddaeus Ropac in Salzburg, respectively.
On the 21st. April 2018, Gormley released a limited edition vinyl album of ambient sounds from his studio for Record Store Day titled Sounds of the Studio. It came with an inner with a monochrome print of his studio on one side and text by the artist with a photo on the other.
In 2019, Gormley populated the island of Delos with iron "bodyforms" with the exhibition Sight.
Organised and commissioned by the NEON Organization and presented in collaboration with the Ephorate of Antiquities of Cyclades, this project marked the first time that an artist took over the archaeological site of Delos since the island was inhabited over 5,000 years ago, and is the first time a contemporary art installation has been unanimously approved to take place in Delos, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Antony installed 29 sculptures made during the last 20 years, including five new works specially commissioned by the NEON Organization, both at the periphery and integrated amongst Delos's archaeological site and museum animating the geological and archaeological features of the island.
Also in 2019, the Royal Academy held an exhibition filling its 13 main galleries with Gormley's works, including some new (designed to fit the space), some remade for the gallery, and some of his early sculptures, with two rooms of his drawings and sketchbooks.
In 2020, Gormley was confirmed to be "lending" a sculpture to Kirklees College to sit atop its new building at Pioneer House in Dewsbury, as part of a major redevelopment in the town.
In 2022, a Gormley sculpture called Alert was installed on the main campus of Imperial College London. The installation raised objections from the student body due to its perceived "phallic" interpretation.
In 2023, Gormley opened a number of large-scale exhibitions, including Living Time at TAG Art Museum in Qingdao, China, and Critical Mass at Musée Rodin in Paris, France, which marked the first time that a living artist has been invited to exhibit in all areas of the museum, including the Hôtel Biron.
As part of the exhibition, Gormley showed his major artwork Critical Mass II, a sculpture comprising 60 cast iron bodies, in and around the museum and its grounds.
Inside the Hôtel Biron, Gormley placed four sculptures in dialogue with Rodin's own work, and also selected a number of his working models to be seen alongside Rodin's plaster maquettes.
Later in the year, Gormley opened Body Politic at White Cube in London, a solo exhibition of new sculptures responding to themes of movement and containment, as well as the topic of migration.
In 2024, Time Horizon, an installation of 100 cast iron sculptures, opened at Houghton Hall in Norfolk. The installation responded to the specific landscape of the parkland and the history of the Hall.
Gormley also unveiled True, for Alan Turing at King's College, Cambridge. This sculpture, made from slabs of Corten steel, celebrates the life and enduring influence of mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. Speaking on the sculpture, Gormley stated:
"Alan Turing unlocked the door between
the industrial and the information ages.
I wanted to make the best sculpture I
could to honour a man who was pivotal
in changing the course of all our lives.
It is not about the memorialisation of a
death, but about a celebration of the
opportunities that a life allowed".
-- Official Recognition of Antony Gormley
Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 with Field for the British Isles.
Gormley has been a Royal Academician since 2003, and was a trustee of the British Museum from 2007 to 2015.
He is an honorary fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and the Royal Institute of British Architects, honorary doctor of the universities of Teesside, Liverpool, University College London, and Cambridge, and a fellow of Trinity and Jesus Colleges, Cambridge.
In October 2010, along with 100 other leading artists, he signed an open letter to Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt protesting cutbacks in the arts.
On the 13th. March 2011 Gormley was awarded the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Dance for the set design for Babel (Words) at Sadler's Wells in collaboration with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Damien Jalet.
He was the recipient of the Obayashi Prize in 2012, and is the 2013 Praemium Imperiale laureate for sculpture.
Gormley was knighted in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to the arts, having previously been appointed OBE in 1998.
For Room, he received the 2015 Marsh Award for Excellence in Public Sculpture.
In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked Gormley number four in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture".
Gormley's auction record is £3,401,250 for a maquette of the Angel of the North, set at Christie's, London, on the 14th. October 2011.
-- Antony Gormley's Personal Life
While at the Slade School of Fine Art, Gormley met Vicken Parsons, who was to become his assistant, and in 1980, his wife, as well as a successful artist in her own right. The couple have a daughter and two sons.
Gormley is a patron of Paintings in Hospitals, a charity that provides art for health and social care in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
In June 2022 Gormley said that he had applied for German citizenship, to which he is entitled through his German mother, after describing Brexit as "a practical disaster" and a "betrayal".
