The ‘Double Blockworks’ are born out of my experience of dwelling with another in the Covid-19 lockdowns. This period of retreat taught me how the life and body of a significant other could become an extension of my own existence. The ‘Big Double Blockworks’ investigate how two bodies can find mutual stability through a shared centre of gravity. By uniting two columns of stacked blocks into a single mass, the works explore the space of physical proximity as both solid and precarious. At one-and-a-half life-size, these massive works act on the body consciousness of the viewer and celebrate vulnerability: the need for support and closeness.

Big Double Blockworks

Conceived as intimate bunkers for one, these sculptures consolidate, structure and embody a spectrum of body postures – variously balanced, compressed and tensioned – that invite a state of mind. Small square orifices at the position of the mouth offer visual access to a darkness within each concrete shell. Both building and surrogate body, these works are meditation cells for imaginative inhabitation.

The ‘Bunkers’ pick up on a long-held belief of mine, that the only place where we can find true freedom is within the infinite darkness of the body available to us once the body is still. Close your eyes and experience this darkness. I consider this the most potent space of personal freedom and these works with their dark, void interiors embody that place of power and potential.

They find their roots in the 1980s and ’90s. Sculptures like 

 (1989), and then the later large-scale installations 

 (1996), are some of my first attempts to describe a human place in space at large through the language of architecture. I still think of these modernist, cubic bunkers as cells: spaces apart that have been taken out of the shared spaces of the world – places of reflection.

Bunkers

Developed over a two-and-a-half-year period, the 

 use two or four circuits of rusted ribbon steel to pass around the space of a body: Möbius strips, the internal surfaces of which become externalised and vice versa. The works break the body-boundary and reach out towards the edges of the spaces they inhabit, recognising how a room’s orthogonality affects our internal perception of space. Linear and open, these works question where the body begins and ends and to what extent we, having made the world, are then made by it.

Extended Strapworks

 are a three-dimensional mapping of body-space and give greater mass to the language of the 

. The ‘knots’ identify areas of internal tension in the head, heart, stomach, genitals and knees, evoking the feeling of lived time 

Knotworks

, I became interested in the relationship between precarity and stability and how a collection of orthogonal space-frames could be crashed into one another or loosely linked to evoke various states of mind and body, and how they might foreground our relationship to space enforced and materialised through architecture. 

 (2021), for example, delineates a body-space formed by, and ‘retreating’ into, the corner of a room, whilst 

 (2021) lies horizontal, back pressed against the wall, attempting to reconcile the organic form of a body with the hard surfaces and rigorous geometry of our habitat. In both, the space-frames are fully fused. 

 (2020) are loose. The first hangs from the ceiling, the latter, in a loose entanglement, rests on the floor, and both evoke gravity’s pull. The fragile and chaotic indeterminacy of the forms is belied by the obdurate nature of the casting.

Cast Framers

The unfinished project of Modernism has to do with its claim to find a visual language that speaks to all human beings, irrespective of race, creed, gender or language group. Modernity built a structure of empirical rationalism on the mind work of the Enlightenment, itself based on the humanism of the Renaissance. And whilst the unviversalism of Modernism has become increasingly questionable in the culture wars of today, its utopian vision of a visual language that accepts the primacy of experiential truth and that can unite people in their difference is still an urgent goal in an ever more divided world. It is for this reason that I believe the promise of Modernism deserves to be fought for. 

How do we acknowledge this unfinished project while also acknowledging the necessity of art to touch and change our internal landscape? These two questions have preoccupied me over the last decade. Here, the plinth or block on which Rodin’s 

 sits and that Brancusi integrated into the language of twentieth-century sculpture is now a core component in a part/whole matrix, sometimes crushing, sometimes being held by a wrestling body. With implicit relations to Michelangelo’s ‘Slaves’, as well as the orthogonal grid so favoured within modernist syntax, the works place form and content in a struggle in which neither block nor body can be said to win.

Blockworks: Wrestling with Modernism

To what extent do sculptures accept the limitations – you might say the imprisonment – imposed by architecture, and to what extent do they try to overcome it?

 meditate on the relationship of bodies to buildings. They could be taken as the revenge of the caryatid or telamon – sculpted figures serving as a columns/architectural supports. The component parts are loose and use dead weight as a principle of construction, but rather than offering reinforcement, these works lean on the walls for support. They are ‘reverse caryatids’: rather than supporting the building they are supported by it, prompting questions about our dependency on our second body – that of the built environment.

Big Assembled Blockworks

A structural and conceptual journey has begun in which inner and outer surfaces switch function, as is found in the Mobius strip or the Kleinian bottle. The dynamic between still object and moving viewer is activated with a line that appears to continually change as one’s perspective changes.

 series at the point where some of the planes could be shared between adjacent cells. You may be able to see the evolution from the earliest works that still articulate body space relating to the original rectangular cells.

As the series develops, the line changes, becoming more fluid and open, mapping the entire bodyspace with a strap that continuously flips. In the evolution of the pieces there has been an attempt to allow the line the greatest possible liberty while having to conform to structural dictates. In the most successful of the standing works there is a compression through the foot and ankle that rises into a liberated upper body space. This shift from constriction to openness is perceptual and emotional.

Recently the works have become freer, evoking a spin and a wobble that suggest energy and potential. Others both integrate with, and are sliced through by, their architectural contexts.

Strapworks

How can you begin to describe the indoors of the body, or the body at rest?

You start thinking about how your two legs are pillars and your pelvis is a lintel. From that point on, you are building the torso as a column. That load path can then begin to articulate a set or an attitude in the body.

That is where drawing comes in. I might draw to work out how to make something, but the drawing exploring the feeling of being and of inhabiting a still body-space, is much more important.

 come out of this investigation of the body as a place of indwelling and what it feels like to look out from this space. 

‘The body space is described as a dense, irregular three-dimensional lattice of straight square-section steel bars, with lines running as if randomly on three axes, intersecting at right angles, yet seemingly without structural support. Space permeates the work: most of the bars are truncated at the point of the body’s invisible surface but indicate the potential for a continuity out into space beyond, while some are withdrawn, suggesting a shift of density at the core.’

Martin Caiger-Smith, ‘Testing a World View’, in 

, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2019, p. 116

Weave Works

 were made in order to return to the idea of making pixels physical. They describe both the space of the body and the block, suggesting a coexistence between biological and mineral matter. Where form begins and ends is re-negotiated at the edge with cuts into space as well as into mass.

] are made from a predetermined, rising canon of solid iron blocks, which abstract the human form and cut into air and space at hard right angles. […] The iron forms might have a solid edge, but where the aggregated block that they are attached to ends, and limbs, hands, feet and face begin, is not always clear. Their surfaces erupt unevenly: a disturbed terrain of rising and falling angles and cubes that seem to expand and contract into the spaces the sculptures inhabit. […]

 as ‘materialised pixellations’. The phrase references how the sculptures are created: translated from a digital scan of the artist’s body. Through this process, Gormley’s body is dematerialized and reduced to lines of code, then cast in solid iron, to reassert a bodily presence. […] Gormley’s 

 both insist on the body’s physicality and suggest our ability to transcend from corporeality into pure information, while also asserting that, on our return, our self will manifest itself permanently altered, abstracted to the point of being barely recognisable.

On a shelf in Gormley’s London studio sits a block of iron pyrite, in which a crystallographic lump turns into naturally formed, interconnected cubes with gleaming-sharp edges. Side-by-side with such geometric, geologic substances, the isometric silhouettes and surface terrains of the 

 can be read ecologically, evoking cell growth and elemental transformation. The way their metal-human forms dip in and out of legibility is reminiscent of naturally occurring mutations or biomorphs, as much as it is of digital formations.’

Aggregate Blockworks

I have long been interested in mitosis or the division of cells as an alternative to sexual reproduction for life's continuance. The very first work to express this idea was the fibreglass 

 (1987). This notion was then explored in the lead bodycase works of the mid-eighties and continued in the single skinned, solid cast works 

 (2004). This idea of a connected, but also separated, body doubling that questions the relation between original and copy, artist and model, image and referent, self and other has continued in these later 

These works are not representations: they attempt to establish a human space 

 space by using the familiar language of our built world. Some originated by fusing works in a kind of symbiosis, and some began with me holding a pattern and being scanned. Others emerged from playing around with two maquettes and seeing how they might fit together.

My thinking has been influenced by so many things, especially Michelangelo’s many versions of the 

 which, in evoking the tragedy of a mother holding the dead body of her son, becomes the inverse of the artist trying to animate stone.

Bodies come out of bodies, and while we might hold that we are free individuals capable of infinite choice, we are also cells in a bigger system – social beings defined by our intimate relations. In the one finding another, continuance becomes possible.

Double Blockworks

The dead weight of individual lumps of clay is used as a means of construction to consider a relationship between parts and whole. The body is seen here as a transposition of matter from the earth below to above the ground, exposed in space.

] are loose assemblages of body parts, head, neck, shoulder, chest and limbs, made of raw material, slabs of wet clay cut, wedged, loosely rolled and casually stacked, almost thrown together, their slumped, heavy forms moulded by the soft touch of their constituent parts one on another. The low temperature firing of the clay effects the most minimal transformation of the base material; the works appear to retain a softness that extends also to their emotional register.’

, London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2019, p. 246

Sculpture Series