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Lot Essay
INSIDER VIII/WEEDS 1, like other works in the Insider series (1997–2005), is the result of a process of objective mathematical reduction leading to a particular form of abstraction. The work carries the trace of the body and its passage through life.
Works in the series began as reductions of the artist’s own body, however, several of the casts were derived from others. In fact, this was the first time Gormley also deliberately worked with other people’s bodies, including women and children. The process of finding form by penetrating deeper within the body proceeded according to a set of predetermined rules: the volume of each body Gormley cast was reduced laterally by 60 per cent, while the height always remained the same.
Made in a durable and relatively permanent base element, iron, Gormley’s intention is that the Insiders endure in time and concentrate space. He states: ‘The earth has iron at its core, and these are like the cooled and revealed magnetic load cores of the body [...] An Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: something that resists, something that is left behind, a core. Insiders are objects suggesting that the most intimate is the most strange; where attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture can be revealed.’
‘Gormley’s fundamental understanding of the body not as an object or a machine but as a place where things happen, a zone within a wider, interconnected field, had always underpinned his work: the search for a way of expressing the body’s energy as it extends beyond the body’s surface, the interplay of contraction and exertion, within and beyond the visible surface of the skin.’ (Martin Caiger-Smith, Antony Gormley, New York: Rizzoli, 2017, p. 252).
Works in the series began as reductions of the artist’s own body, however, several of the casts were derived from others. In fact, this was the first time Gormley also deliberately worked with other people’s bodies, including women and children. The process of finding form by penetrating deeper within the body proceeded according to a set of predetermined rules: the volume of each body Gormley cast was reduced laterally by 60 per cent, while the height always remained the same.
Made in a durable and relatively permanent base element, iron, Gormley’s intention is that the Insiders endure in time and concentrate space. He states: ‘The earth has iron at its core, and these are like the cooled and revealed magnetic load cores of the body [...] An Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: something that resists, something that is left behind, a core. Insiders are objects suggesting that the most intimate is the most strange; where attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture can be revealed.’
‘Gormley’s fundamental understanding of the body not as an object or a machine but as a place where things happen, a zone within a wider, interconnected field, had always underpinned his work: the search for a way of expressing the body’s energy as it extends beyond the body’s surface, the interplay of contraction and exertion, within and beyond the visible surface of the skin.’ (Martin Caiger-Smith, Antony Gormley, New York: Rizzoli, 2017, p. 252).