Forms of reproduction in which the distinctions between one body becoming two, mitosis and two bodies becoming one and sexual intercourse become interchangeable has long been a preoccupation. I have explored it through drawing and sculpture for over three decades. These drawings start with an organic liquid that pools and, like an amoeba, evolves into binary form. I hope that familiar binaries like self/other, artist/model, creator/created are made pliable, porous and questionable in this process of becoming and emergence.

Couple Drawings

I’ve had a relationship with mushrooms since being very young: memories of a Nissen hut with no windows, just the powerful smell of mushrooms and the peaty earth where they miraculously grew in the dark, or my grandfather walking me through the Schwarzwald, stopping to point out delicate fungi, never picking them, but keenly noting the poisonous ones.

Mushrooms are a kind of signalling from the underworld. If everything is earth above ground, these are periscopes sent up from a world that lies beyond sight. We are slowly realising the amount of work that goes on in the earth through carbon sequestration: dark, moist hummus, where the geology of the planet gives over to the biology of the biosphere. There is something about the smell of mushrooms that connects you to the dark earth and its fructifying potential.

The inkcaps come in October in smooth and shaggy varieties. The trick is to pick them when they’re just about to deliquesce; if you harvest them too early, they may never transform into inky liquid. I love the way that the ink behaves: charcoal black when it dries but gooey like egg albumen, so leaving trails that vary in width with its gluey held-togetherness.

A mushroom top separated from its stem and allowed to sit for a few hours produces a shadowed impression of itself. Being interested in all indexical signage, all traces, footprints, scratches and shadows, these are the most intriguing of all: the generative spores of the fungi making a picture of the parent body.

Inkcap Drawings

These drawings allow the behaviour of mineral dispersion on wet paper to carry a sense of grounded body awareness, where spreading fields of carbon register bodily sensations from immersion to stricture. Each dark pool held within the paper’s confines is evocative of human presence, and the titles are subtly suggestive of its various states: 

The drawings were the starting point for a series of ‘Bunker’ works where similarly compressed body positions gave form to hollow, minimal buildings made from reinforced concrete that enclose the space of the body, its darkness visible through a single aperture at the mouth. These will be exhibited in the exhibition 

from 22 November 2023 to 28 January 2024 at White Cube Bermondsey, London.

Hold

Blood, iron, earth, they are all connected with vitality: our aliveness. All of my early blood drawings were in my own blood. On spending more time in the woods and fields of Norfolk, I began to use the blood of hare and deer which separates, pools, dries and coagulates in its own way. Thinking of the body as both the source of an expanded field but also its confluence is what these works interrogate, but they also evoke embodiment as a process, an open place in space where there is no doing but a lot of being. These traces of the body are caught in suspension as if in a web. The tension between web and delta is pertinent, both to the way the drawings are made, but also in how they make us think of, with and in the material of life.

Blood Field

 drawings are caught within grids of lines that, from every direction, cut across and through them. These bodies are both light and solid, using the milk-based casein with soft brushstrokes; limbs and evocations of torso that are much darker than the grid-lines; and with right angles to mark joints. They are studies of metal work. Some of them, however, achieve the ambiguity and fluidity of the human condition in a way that reaches beyond the sculptures. This delicate use of wash on paper is a quiet but powerful evocation of what I see as the core idea of these drawings: we realise, deep in this body of ours, that we are and need to be both rooted and adrift.’

Extract from Hugh Brody, ‘Roots / Uprooted’, 

, Hong Kong: White Cube, 2018, pp. 20-21.

‘AG: These are the drawings that will be part of the show. You could say that this axonometric projection is what architects use to give perspectival and objective impressions of a building in space. I do the meridians at the same time as the emergent body and they become part of one another. I am fond of this method because it gives you that sense of balance or loss of balance/dis-equilibrium/equilibrium - the feeling of a body in space that, while being defined by these lineaments, also conveys uncertainty: we don’t know whether it is buried in a matrix or liberated from it.

CL: Or whether it has runners and slides back and forth…

AG: There are lots that are more to do with falling. Drawing is very much part of the whole process of discovering. I use drawing to learn the possible extensions...

CL: And then you deliberately work with a brush and ink, so you can’t get a straight line? Certain points are dictated by how the medium flows from the tool you are using?

AG: Drawing is always freer and more open than the sculpture. It’s an open exploration but these are all quite focussed works.’

Extract from ‘Rooting Thinking in the Present Moment: A conversation between Antony Gormley and Catherine Lampert’, in 

Rooter

 series are made by scratching with an etching burin in a sheet of paper that has been previously soaked with a light carbon and casein wash - sharp lines made directly into wet paper. The scratches absorb the surrounding pigment and water at a faster rate than the unscratched areas, sometimes forming a halo or penumbra around the line.

In all of these drawings, the hope is to convey something about energy presence and the materialisation of space itself through the agency of linear form. They are made in parallel to the making of the sculpture, but they are not strictly-speaking preparatory studies. They are drawings in their own right that evoke the space, feeling and form of the works, while never illustrating them.

 drawings are made in a spirit of total immersion in repeated, definitive, sequential incisions. There is little or no room for doubt or dithering. It could be said that the drawings make themselves, each evolving into a particular site. They identify a place of contemplation, energisation and potential identification, without occupying it.

Zone

 drawings, evoking the luminous beginnings of astral matter. The works appear to emerge rather than be willed into form: windows onto deep space.

They are swiftly executed using a Chinese calligraphy brush lightly touched onto the paper. They may be composed of just a single brush stroke, or one stroke repeated three or four times to create a dark background. Some have hardly been touched.

I prefer the single gesture - a single event (some are called 

) - created by the forces of fluid matter and discovered, rather than made. Others are titled 

 in honour of the chromatics of the sun: our very own thermo-nuclear generator.

Cosmic

 drawings introduce space as a subject, revealed by a geometry that escapes from traditional perspective. Vanishing points are replaced by a matrix resembling simulations of synaptic activity or the plasma of deep intergalactic space.

These drawings are made in parallel with the 

 sculptures - fine webs or nets made of stainless-steel bar that seem to tremble in space. The drawings are not strictly speaking preparatory studies or illustrations but are drawings in their own right, evoking the space, feeling and form of the 

 drawings, they are made by scratching with an etching burin into a sheet of paper that has been previously soaked with a light carbon and casein wash: sharp lines made directly into the wet paper. The scratches absorb the surrounding pigment and water at a faster rate than the unscratched areas, sometimes forming a halo or penumbra around the lines.

Polyhedra Scratch

These drawings reflect the way in which light and water dominate in the liminal realm of the north Norfolk coast. They are not exactly descriptions but evocations of the blurring of perception between solid, aerial, and liquid.

The light is particular in East Anglia; the skies seem more open here. The sense of being level with the sea and the continuation of condition between land and water, dawns on you slowly. 

In some senses these drawings make themselves: I am simply a witness, or instigator, of something that might evoke a landscape but have become actual landscapes. They come about by flooding the paper with water and then, with a fully charged Chinese brush, allowing its touch to spread pigment. The interpenetration of mineral and water happens in time and is dependent on season and temperature as much as my will or ability. It is less a matter of picturing than of bearing witness to the arising of something and then acknowledging it. I have deliberately tried to keep the materiality, mineralogy, and momentariness of the drawings, intact. Water is what they honour – water, time and temperature is what made them.

I am happy to look at them now as one might look at the marks left by the receding flood: dried salt on a rock, or the tideline on a beach. Perhaps they are less to be looked at than lived with, dwelt in.

Weather

Early on, I wanted the drawings to be palpable. I used blood, milk, semen: all substances that are to do with life and that have their own colour and their own way of behaving. Since 2016 I have also begun using crude oil as a medium: the stored energy of millions of years of photosynthetic life on this earth.

Traces and stains are as important as symbols or definitions. Blood draws itself. As Leonardo da Vinci said, just look at the damp stains on the wall and you will see a picture of the world and how it works. I believe that.

 drawings began in relation to grids drawn in pencil but then became increasingly free. A play then evolved between the determinism of the grid and the intrinsic un-conformism of the hand. As in handwriting, where a letter form is interpreted, so too here is the grid. This mutation and the inherent blurring or fugitive quality of the oil’s penetration and suffusion into the fibres of the paper, allow the rigidity of the grid to become expressive.

 (2014-18), the sculpture series where, as Rebecca Comay explains, ‘the body has dissolved into the grid: it has become nothing but a three-dimensional Cartesian diagram of itself. The grid no longer adheres to the surface of the body but rather occupies the entire volume of the body. There is no body - only the vestigial co-ordinates of a body that has been abbreviated to its minimal internal geometry.’

See Rebecca Comay, 'Extreme Measures', in 

, White Cube Bermondsey, London, 2016, p. 107.

Grid

As a child, growing up next to the sea and often being alone on the beach at the end of the day, there was a sense of almost disappearing into the combination of light, ground and air. The 

 drawings return to the theme of being invited to re-inhabit not just your body, but your time, your being. There’s something about the way in which the oil behaves and the fact that these bodies are being absorbed by the paper and slowly bleeding to the point where they almost become invisible, that chimes with what they evoke.

 drawings exhibited together at the Royal Academy of Arts in 2019, Martin Caiger-Smith states, ‘Often, the mark of a standing figure is set against an insistent horizon in a space of uncertain scale, asserting an identity between the two, marking an encounter and a passage of the body in space and time.’

See Martin Caiger-Smith, in ‘Antony Gormley’, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2019, p. 228

Reflection

works are formed by fine lines carved by the point of a burin into paper wetted by a solution of water carbon and casein. Pigment carried by water is absorbed by the fresh cut, creating a darker line on a ground made of the same fluid.

Here, the body is reduced to a stick figure: the minimum signage necessary to carry the notion of the body. I also wanted to indicate a field in which the body is immersed and from which it cannot be isolated. This is carried, in part, by the liquid medium, which allows the scratches to be registered, and also by the way that the lines that come together to form a figure also extend outwards to make a map.

I like to treat the surface of the paper like the open high plain where the Nazca drew their figures, only here, the lines can be seen as roads or runways: paths of potential rather than the representation of mythic figures or symbols.

The site drawings evoke, in two dimensions, the same questions about perception and spacetime come directly out of the 

Drawing Series