Researching more deeply into my performance and site-specific performance in general my group and I discovered Antony Gormely. A British sculptor who’s known works include the Angel of the North. Gormley mainly focus’ on exploring the relationship of the human body with space.
However, I found him and his work interesting in relation to our performance. One project he did was ‘Field for the British Isles’ (1993) where he created little clay figures and filled a room entirely with these. On these little clay figures there were two small eyes. Gormley said that they were “Energised by fire, sensitized by touch and made conscious by being given eyes” (Gormley). I found that this linked really nicely to our piece as we found, when trying out our idea of painting the toy soldiers, that when we painted their eyes and faces it removed their consciousness and their character and dehumanized them. When viewing this installation by Gormley audience’s “become aware that [they] have unwittingly walked onto a stage where normal relationships between observer and observed are reserved” (Gormley, Leader, Orbach and Salecl, 20008, 360) and when looking at the image you can see how an audience member may feel as though they are on a stage and he crowds of clay sculptures look like a packed out audience in a theatre. The art is literally looking back at you.
Gormley has also created work with larger statues. One being, ‘Critical Mass’ (1995) where he used life sized statues of people to fill a space in a warehouse building. There were “5 casts of 12 positions: ground-hugging, crouching, foetal, squatting, sitting, kneeling, standing, mourning and a final instability – an ascent of man ranging through the complex syntax of the body.” (Gormley)
They were ‘thrown’ into a pile in the centre of the room to show the uselessness status of statues and sculptures themselves and how forgotten they have been. Linking with our soldiers, how individually they have been forgotten and how, deep down memorials are just there and can’t convey the strong emotion and memories that they stand for.
http://www.antonygormley.com/
Gormley, A. Leader, D. Orbach, S. and Salecl, P. (2008) Public Space and the Body. 24 (1) 360