, Antony Gormley collaborated with a team of Bangladeshi artisans to create 

 (2023), a ‘drawing in space’ made from 2.5 km of bundled bamboo. An explosion of line, 

 invites viewers to transform its sinuous materiality into movement as they duck and twist through this looping entanglement. Temporary in nature, this dynamic field of energy evokes the shapeshifting journey of bamboo in Bangladesh – and will be recycled into other forms after the Summit.

Turn, Dhaka Art Summit

Through the conversion of anatomy into an architectural construction I want to re-assess the relation between body and space. Balancing on the balls of the feet while squatting on its haunches and surveying the world around it, the attitude of 

The piece acts with the changing nature of the trees. In the summer the deep red oxidised surface will contrast with the vivid green of the plane trees’ leaves and in the winter its orthogonal geometry will act in consort with the organic inscription of their boughs.

occupies a central position on Imperial College Road at Imperial’s South Kensington campus. It is accessible to both Imperial’s community and members of the public alike, adding to the cultural richness of the area.

Alert, Imperial College London

 is a vast open matrix spanning the roof terrace of the National Gallery Singapore, made from rings or ‘orbits’ of metal, acting as a continually mutating spatial frame as you walk through it.

The paradox of the horizon is that it is the perceptual limit of our consciousness that moves with us and yet, in the non-locality of the quantum world where neither here or now (the constants by which we experience life) are present, we become the reflexive part of a de-centred, unfolding world.

There's a bit of dance here, the circles could be hula hoops; it invites you to become aware of your more animal nature, to feel it... Walter Pater said that all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music – so it is something that exists outside of you, but also inside you, and in a way, possesses you. Horizon Field Singapore doesn't have anything to show, it doesn't have anything to tell. It is an invitation to feel your own life through the context that it gives you.

Horizon Field Singapore

 is a vast cluster of cuboid voids with irregular facets, set as if at random angles one to another. Sculpture on the scale of architecture, it fills the space, pressing against the gallery’s perimeters […] 

The co-ordinates of the building - and the sense of stability afforded by the horizontal and vertical of wall and ceiling and floor - are radically disrupted [...] It is impossible to gather in one view; the form, difficult to read given the scale of the work and its position, is of a body, hunched, lying on one side, one knee raised. Its external form can be negotiated, and viewed, in part, from the constricted space between its outer surfaces and the gallery walls. This is the body as building: a foot protrudes through the gallery’s doorway; an aperture offers a way in, and the prospect of a slow, careful passage through internal chambers. Entering, you feel your own moving body more deeply, as you try to find your bearings and make your way through the larger body of 

. Two facets of the body’s surface are open (at the head, and the raised knee) to glimpses of the gallery’s cornice and ceiling - and to allow light to fall from above, affording constant interplay of dim illumination and darkness in the cavernous, resonating space - almost subterranean in feel - inside the body. An exit is made, by way of the arm and the hand, to the gallery beyond.

Martin Caiger Smith, edited excerpt from the exhibition catalogue 

, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2019, p.214

Cave, Royal Academy of Arts, London

 […] return[s] to raw material, the stuff of the earth, its stark presentation of the unformed. Viewed from a threshold […] 

 extends before you, immediate and visible in its entirety. It is a vast liquid expanse, an admix of equal parts earth and Atlantic seawater, flooding the gallery to a depth of 23 centimetres. 

A raw, uncanny occupation of space, the work unavoidably asserts the presence of the organic and the elemental in an exhibition of constructed environments and architectural reference. Host is ‘the outside brought inside’, as Gormley puts it, a tabula rasa and an evocation of the world yet to be acted upon. It enacts a still, silent assault on the senses as earth, air and water exchange their elements, exuding a rich organic smell; its red-brown surface reflects the shifting conditions of natural light as time passes. 

 offers another horizon, though one framed by four walls; as such it could be read as a canvas laid down, a painting in two dimensions, or as a three-dimensional sculptural form - as an alien addition to the space, a deposit, or as a subtraction, an emptying out.

Martin Caiger Smith, edited excerpt from the exhibition catalogue Antony Gormley, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2019, p. 250.

Host, Royal Academy of Arts, London

 is a mass of interpenetrating space frames, rectangular volumes delineated by their edges of thin steel reinforcing mesh - the invisible skeleton of concrete architecture. This is, perhaps, the most abstract possible means of rendering the built environment, and the most minimal.

 as an object is a kind of ghostly diagram - another drawing in space, this time resolutely rectilinear. The rectangular void at its core represents a ‘unit of habitation’: the average dimensions of a European bedroom constructed today. Frames of increasing volume surround and encompass the void, describing it by touching its edges. Together, in their repetition and extension of a simple form, the frames read as an indeterminate, amorphous aggregation; their individual space and transparency become condensed, almost impenetrable visually. On the long axis of the gallery, suspended as if weightless, just above head height, rising and expanding from its flattish base like a thundercloud, 

 again confounds the eye: what is foreground, what mid-ground, what furthest distant? If building is, in essence, about confinement, imposing limits on space, 

 uses architecture’s means and materials to make manifest a measureless, indefinable, shifting form, imaginatively without dimensions, like the infinite extension of the mind.

Martin Caiger Smith, excerpt from the exhibition catalogue 

 Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2019, p.114.

Matrix, Royal Academy of Arts, London

I think of this pose as a relaxed Buddha.

 in concrete, I wanted to live with one of these large, stacked stone block works. This was made in fifty-one tons of Albanian white limestone characterised by its fossilised bivalve shells.

Its size indicates an object between sculpture and building.

It offers good ledges for sitting and looking out at the landscape onto which the work looks.

There is no mortar and so entire object uses its own deadweight as a means of construction, allowing load paths through 80mm diameter pads each capped with lead.

Block II, Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Germany

The sculpture was made in response to the stairwell and the light shaft at its core. It is attached to the building but has to have integrity and be virtually self-supporting. This consideration was an important contributor to 

 final form. It is suspended from the skylight and supported from the floor, connecting at the mid-point where the largest polyhedron lies.

 is a light-weight reply to the fixity of a column, an obelisk, or even Brancusi’s ‘Endless Column’: all of these convey an impression of stability and make a solid bridge between above and below, whereas 

 evokes a more dynamic relationship between matter and energy. This column is made of a myriad of polyhedra linked as a chain and they cluster in places of high tension. The balls reflect the world around them. This ball and element construct is used to model molecular structure but here is used without illustrating any particular molecule and eliminates all symmetry.

When making this work, what intrigued me was the reconciliation of the organic and the geometric. This geometry is a characteristic of foam structures, a universal and economic way to structure space: bubble geometries exist in the pith of desert grasses and in our bones. Its random yet principled matrices have been assumed into parametric design.

Chord, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Over the years, my obsession has been to try to explore the body as a place rather than simply as an object and to reconcile its space with space at large. I want to acknowledge that while we live within a built environment and we are the only animal to construct a habitat using Euclidean principles, the moment we close our eyes and become conscious of the darkness of the body, we are in an unbounded, ever extending space without dimension. This intimate zone of experience has the same unlimited properties as the sky at night.

 the cosmological constant of an expanding universe is applied to the subjective space of the body. The work is comprised of 60 boxes that evoke the unstable place of the body as an architectural field: 60 cases for darkness, or night, each derived from the volumes of my body but translated into the geometry of architecture.

Fabricated in Corten steel and hermetically welded, the sculptures are absolute displacements of space; volumes of night placed in light. They are made from up to thirty different body positions that have each been expanded as many as six times, and the resulting expansions are orientated in all directions. The incremental expansion of these body zones is random but they are placed on a clear grid, through which the body of the viewer is invited to wander.

This is a reflective field in which subjective experience is catalysed by voided objects. The degree to which it encourages projection is the degree to which it encourages proprioception.

Expansion Field, Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern

If this crouching body were to stand up it would be just under 22 metres high, but it is hunkered down and embeds itself into its host building. Although an addition of over two storeys, it complements the scale of the north wing and is integrated into the building line, taking its place within the fabric of London. In both its title and form, the work treats the body as habitat: our primary dwelling place, while still being a resolute object commanding space. The house-sized sculpture is made of large rectangular steel volumes that apply the syntax of architecture to the body.

 there is no furniture apart from the bed covered in white linen. The internal surfaces of the hollow blocks provide ledges and niches. The wood is left untreated, with finger joints at the corners left slightly proud. The walls are made of wooden planks of different widths of a dark, reddish-brown colour, with the figuring of the oak modulating the surface.

I want the room to be both in the city but absolutely removed from it, giving a feeling of enclosure within and exposure without. I want it to be a safe-haven, a retreat, a place of peace, with a feeling of being fully enclosed but not cut off from outside. The window above the bed is high, it gives a view of the sky and can be opened. At night, the shutters allow total blackout. The interior is only 4 metres square but 10 metres high, close at body level, but lofty and open above. The idea is to reveal this slowly and allow the articulation of the interior to became more than the provision of comfort and shelter but to be an interior, articulated night.

The black curtain that has to be drawn aside to enter 

, uncovers a threshold formed by the metallic surface of the external skin as it traverses the staircase passage. Here, all of the layers of the construction are revealed. On entering the room all you see is the lit bed. The traveller, on lying down to sleep, can switch these spotlights off and in the minutes that it takes for the eyes to readjust to the dark, discover that this darkness has form. The internal spaces of the ankles, elbows and neck have subliminal levels of light that illuminate parts of the interior that are otherwise inaccessible. This indirect, very low light provides modelling. I want to structure night as a preamble to sleeping and dreaming.

It is the first time that I have attempted to sculpt darkness itself. My ambition for this work is that it should confront the monumental with the most personal, intimate experience.

Room, Beaumont Hotel, London

 attempts to integrate an artistic intervention with the function and material qualities of the building, making a drawing in space that reinforces the experience of a succession of spatial encounters.

The sculpture is seen both from outside and within the building, and works between the storage and access spaces. It is connected to the elements, the flooded inner courtyards, and the changing conditions of light and sky.

 is catalytic in the way that it uses space, attempting to activate rather than occupy it.

It allows for the flow of visitors moving from the public to the reading spaces across the glazed connecting bridge to continually interact with the work. It is possible to glimpse, in one view, the collapsed perspective forming a cloud that replicates itself in the water; from the other, a frame out into the landscape view to the south.

By breaking and opening the work, it ceases to be a simple object and becomes a catalyser of experience. It plays equally with the subjective experience of the viewer and the objective experience of the building: the viewer becomes implicated in the chain as he passes between the two parts of the work, passing from the hall to the reading rooms.

From outside there is a sense of a cloud breathing within the building.

The transparency of the work is a foil to the open nature of the satellite buildings and the more closed box of the archive storage.

Cloud Chain, French National Archives, Paris

is part of Antony Gormley’s series of participatory works. It relates to and extends the previous experiments of 

s high plinth (2009), the disorientation of 

 invited 2400 people to occupy an empty plinth in Trafalgar Square, London, in place of a statue and become representations of themselves for one hour each. 

 immersed the viewer in a bright, dense cloud, removing all visual objects, making the viewer’s consciousness the subject of the work. The iron bodies of 

Vorarlberg engaged the viewers in a perceptual field.

 is a vast, floating plane with a mirror-like surface, seven and a half metres from the ground. The suspended floor uses the structural capabilities and architectural context of the 100 year-old building of the Deichtorhallen to re-orientate the viewer/participants in time and space and toward each other.

It allows a new point of view to see the interior of the building and from it - through the clear lower roof lights - the city.

The work is experimental and invites adventure. Its structure is live and responsive to human movement. It has the potential of oscillation at 7 hZ, or a seven minute swing cycle.  With a weight of between 50 - 65 tonnes, small groups are able to swing the whole floor very slowly. Anyone wishing to initiate change or movement has to communicate with others. The evolution of collective behaviour on the 

 depends on feedback, both via word of mouth and social media. This work provokes an experience of re-orientation and re-connection with the actions of walking, feeling, hearing and seeing. Individual and group experience are mediated through vibration, sound and reflection.

 eliminates much of the light from the roof to the ground floor of the space. When you are underneath the floating structure there is an acoustic transmission of the footfall above. One is acutely aware of the weight of the work and its detached instability. Every quality of the day or night, every sound and accident of light is part of the work itself.

This entire project could be seen as the translation of a large painting into a literal sounding board for the spirit and consciousness of the viewers.  They become active participants in a plane of ‘un-knowing’ in which individual human life is suspended between sky and earth. The work acts on and mediate between the space-nature of consciousness and the gravity-bound condition of the body, reframing the excitement of being alive.

Making