Antony Gormley: Where
Ubiety by Steven Connor
A newly commissioned essay, written in 2026, from the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition Antony Gormley: Where.
Here and There
Being-there, in the manner designated by Martin Heidegger as Dasein, means never being able merely to be there. One makes one’s place in the manner of marking it off from other places. You must proverbially lie in the bed you have made, but it is reciprocally the case that you make your bed simply by lying in it. The dog making its bed for the night, by flattening a space of containment with its own circulating body, is repeating the gesture of the burrow, made by the mole or the worm, or the potter scooping a containing hollow from a lump of clay. One’s body is not merely in space, it makes room for itself. The word ‘mark’ perhaps derives from the idea of a boundary, or marking off, but extends to the word ‘march’, and so embodies the idea of inhabiting a place by pacing it out, as in ceremonies of beating the bounds. To mark your territory with the signs of your presence is to assimilate it to the expanded field of your body, in all its abidings and reachings.
Topologically, the space one makes out and marks out in the outside world can be a second body, doubling the interior that the body itself is. Modes of conveyance – boats, ships, cars, tanks, and trains – are simultaneously modes of transport and places of inhabitation, both places and ways of changing places. The body is in fact a habitat, a field of operations, a compendium of postures and dispositions, and ways of living out its space.
All of the systems on which we depend and which extend from us – clothing, housing, air conditioning, health care, insurance, habits and systems of symbolism – are secondary bodies of this kind. This work of protection is continued after death by the monument, casket, canopic jar, and sarcophagus, though the name of the last (‘flesh-eater’) testifies to the desire for it to be a slow-cooker contrivance for dissolving flesh rather than preserving it. It is as though, like the pupating insect, the body sealed in the sarcophagus is consumed in order to reemerge transformed.
And every inhabitation makes an impact, leaves a trace that spells a name. There is no existence without advertisement. Every abode is an address. In Gerard Manley Hopkins’ sonnet ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’:
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells; Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. (1)
One’s body is one’s own, and, more than that, is the principle of one’s ownness. To be a body, to have a body, is to be a singular body, and therefore, always to be occupying a space that no other body can at that time. But the uniqueness of our body, which impels us to have a constant care for its comfort and integrity, is what integrates us into what most human religions and polities (these are likely indistinguishable) think of as a social body. We care for our bodies, and that care is collective. We spend longer in the care of other members of our species than any other species, and take their care as a model for our continuing self-care.
Humans live between the condition of the corporeal and the incorporeal, ‘a wonder tortur’d in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace’ (2). But the body, taken so often to be the antagonist of the spirit, is in fact the route to it. No so-called ‘out-of-body’ experience ever reported, whether involving floating, hovering, expansion, or ascent, has involved anything that is entirely bodiless, or was not an imaginary projection into some enlargement of the body. No out-of-body experience has recorded the sense of being in two places at once, which is what being out of the body would have to mean. Religious or metaphysical reflections, like those of John Donne, in the sermon he preached at the dedication of the chapel of Lincoln’s Inn in 1623, constantly weave together mortal location and divine ubiquity:
As it diminishes not, preiudices not Gods Eternitie, that wee giue him his Quando … it diminishes not, preiudices not Gods Vbiquitie and Omnipresence, that wee giue him his Vbi … God does not need a house, but man does need, that God should haue a House. (3)
Everyone
Antony Gormley’s works are often groups or collections of body-forms, and, even when they are singular, they also seem to belong to such groups. When we look at one of Gormley’s casts, or offprints, we do not see an individual entity, but one of a possible series, at hand or implied. Even when they do not themselves form series or sequences, Gormley’s works always seem to convoke the generic or the collective sense of being a body among others, most notably in the pullulating mob of clay figures that make up Field for the British Isles (1993) and Asian Field (2003). The exhibition Body Field (2022) is a slide show of postures, bowed, leaning, seated.
The title of Sleeping Field (2015–16) encourages the reading of its 11 ensemble of forms as a dormitory grammar of bodies awaiting resurrection in company with their crooked neighbours. These repertoire pieces are like declensions of the body’s possibilities of position, disposition, and inclination, recalling picture books spelling out the letters of the alphabet with human bodies. Many of Gormley’s sculptures are abstracts or anagrams of the body, made of blocks, grids, webs, or lattices, as though to blow up into palpability the pixelated condition of digital images at the point of losing their recognisability.
For indeed, if the body is the very form of everyone’s singularity, the uniqueness and nonsuch of every ‘one’, then it is also that for everyone. Its singularity is substitutable, because everyone is a kind of ‘one’, and in exactly and entirely the same way. In being one, we are at one with all the ‘endless altered people’ similarly so. (4) We may be, as we sometimes say, ‘one of a kind’, but this implies, in immaculate oxymoron, one with our ‘kind’. You could never really be one of a kind unless you were the first and last of your kind, sans kin or offspring. My identity with myself, which makes it impossible for me to be elsewhere than here, or otherwise than myself, makes me identical with everybody else. You can never be over here, where I am, unless I vacate the place, but you can be nowhere else but symmetrically in the here in which you equivalently inhere.
The body prints that Gormley has been making over the last decade connect archaeological images of interred bodies with contemporary scanning technologies like ultrasound, X-ray, CT (computed tomography), and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). Like the three-dimensional casts Gormley has made of his own body, these body prints make for a strange embrace of intimacy and anonymity. The process required to create these ‘sarcographs’ is at once messy and meticulous, like the making of a death mask or life mask, requiring that the front of the artist’s body be primed with crude oil, linseed oil, and petroleum jelly, prior to its slow and careful deposition on to the paper. The process communicates with the mudpie delight of children making snow angels with their stationary supine flight of arms and legs in the snow.
Gormley’s body prints show the body face down, recalling the story of the notorious seventeenth-century London pickpocket Mary Frith, known as ‘Moll Cutpurse’, who concluded her memoirs with her wish to be buried face down ‘as because I am unworthy to look upwards, and that as I have in my LIFE been preposterous, so I may be in my Death … let the Sexton mumble Two or Three Dusty Claiy words and put me in, and there’s an END’. (5) Tombs and memorials always show the body on its back, looking upwards and forwards to its resurrection, rather than facing downwards into the deep dark backward of the earth, nose ahead of the eye, even though it is the earth that gives the most solemn promise of the body’s return to life. Gormley’s body prints similarly alternate prone and supine, flipping verso into recto. What we see printed on the paper is something like what we can imagine the surface itself seeing ‘feelingly’, of what is pressed up (or down) against it. (6) The body print presents us with the same kind of two-dimensional slice through a voluminous body as a foetal ultrasound or an MRI scan. It is the opposite of a relief map, reminding us that the body can never be flat, for there will always be knobbly protrusions and eminences (from eminere, to jut out or project), brow, nose, chin, ribs, elbows, pelvis, knees. A similar rotation is effected between the horizontality of a body laid out and the verticality of a body hung up, in ghastly parody of ascension, as on a scaffold, or a crucifix, or in the posthumous degradation, dreaded by eighteenth-century malefactors even worse than the anatomy table, of being hung in chains.
Indication
There is a tender libido of the index. Why are we so touched by crumple or dint, by that which has left the trace of its touch? It is perhaps because of the innocence of the accidental, the tenderness of what is unintended, made en passant. In the fingerprint, the smear of a breath, the blot of a dropped tear, we give ourselves away, unmeant, careless, contingent. There is always a touch of miracle in a trace. Images of this kind can turn accident into intent, as in the use of the thumbprint or the simple cross as an identifying mark by the illiterate. In actuality, the authenticity of the signature derives from the fact that it is a kind of body-writing, the primal marking of a presence rather than the making of a predication.
Like the output of the polygraph, it is a reflex of the nervous system, rather than a purposive action. When one is asked to repeat a signature, to verify that it is indeed one’s own, the difficulty is always the same as when one is fatuously encouraged to ‘act naturally’. You can mean to make a signature, but you cannot mean your signature itself, in the way that it makes you mean the document to which it says amen, just as you cannot retract what your signature assents to by protesting that you did not mean to make it while you made it.
Nature cannot act, not because it is inert but precisely because it can never repose and must always be in action, which in nature is always to say interaction, everywhere contagious, colliding, concussive, caressing. Stories like that of the haemorrhissa or ‘woman having an issue of blood’ in the New Testament, who is healed by touching the fringe of Christ’s garment (Luke 8:43, AKJV), suggest the generativity of glancing or accidental touches. The doctrine of spontaneous generation encouraged the belief that flies and fleas were born from drops of sweat in dust. The handkerchief of Saint Veronica, whose name means ‘true image’, and the Shroud of Turin commingle life and death, prefiguring the idea of photography as the compulsive writing of light. The logic of the Rorschach test is that it will bring to light the unconscious forms of the subject’s obsession or preoccupation. But there is always, in the contemplation of amorphous forms, clouds, coffee grounds, entrails, stains, the grain of the wood, and the crack in the teacup, a kind of ‘pre-occupation’ with the act of looking, always on the lookout for the possibility of limning a body or figuring out a face.
Prospects
Wherever we may be in the world or out of it, we are in a body that defines us, literally marking out the shape of our finitude, in space and in time. But for creatures organised on the axis of before and behind as we are, being-there also gives us aim, orientation, tendency, attentiveness. As forward-facing creatures, our being-there always also has a direction, so that we are not only at a specific place in the world, we are also at it, in the sense that we are orientated towards it, like Milton’s Adam and Eve departing from Eden: ‘The world was all before them, where to choose / Their place of rest’. (7) What Gormley calls ‘being somewhere and looking out’ ensures that being-there always has some over-there in prospect. (8) ‘You can’t do that here’, says the policeman to the drunk about to relieve himself against a lamp post in the music-hall joke. ‘But I’m not going to do it here, offisher’, protests the drunk. ‘I’m going to do it Right – Over – There.’
Waiters the world over know that solitary diners will always, with the occasional sociopathic exception, expect to be shown to a seat with their back to the wall, facing outwards on to the spreading human scene, ready to defend their place and plate against marauders. Corners are cosy because they are defendable, for whatever our place may be, it will be a coign of vantage – a ‘lookout’. For every inside there is an outlook; for every hollow, there is an aperture. A room of one’s own must be a room with a view. Shakespeare often reverts to the strange sense of repose given by precipitous position, like the wet sea-boy enviously imagined by the insomniac Henry IV, dozing in his crow’s nest on the ‘high and giddy mast’; or the unresting martlets nesting in thin air at the beginning of Macbeth: ‘no jutty, frieze, / Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird / Hath made his pendent bed and procreant cradle’. (9)
The figures in Gormley’s works, like the Angel of the North (1998) near Gateshead in north-east England, or Exposure (2010) in Lelystad, the Netherlands, often suggest sentinels, who may be scrying, surveying, or keeping watch over the landscapes in which they are placed. Gormley’s figures are not just positioned, they are at their posts, prompting in viewers the projective thought, ‘what could I see from there?’ Sight (2019), an installation in the archaeological site at Delos in Greece, with its community of little people looking inwards, outwards, and downwards, is at once, in art-historical jargon, site-specific and sight-specific. Exposure has become known locally as De Poepende Man, the pooping peeper, and there is indeed no exposure so absolute as having to perform this office in a landscape without cover or corner. But the figure is secured against shame by the secluding composure of his quietly intent gaze, ‘making a corner’ in the world. The uprightness of the biped trades speed for optical command, allowing the world to be kept in view. No matter how absurd or abased the posture, there is always a kind of elevation in a perspective.
Gormley’s drawings of the early 1980s, such as Mould (1981), evoke dark intrauterine spaces, with homunculus-like figures connected umbilically to light and emergence by corridors of blank space. The woodblock prints exhibited at Cristea Roberts Gallery create similar apertures from broad strips of ink ‘mown’ in successive overlays across body-sized sheets of paper laid over plywood surfaces, which leave ‘open’ spaces of omission, avoidance, or aspiration. They may be read as the light, releasing or oncoming, at the end of a tunnel, or as skylights suspended above. Gormley’s work often seems to be in postural conversation with the work of Samuel Beckett, and these white zones seem to recall the empty zone of avoidance formed by the cowled figures pacing around and diagonally across a square in the television play Quad. Beckett’s novella The Lost Ones documents the efforts of a ‘little people’ of searchers within an enclosed cylinder to locate a way out. Some of these ‘amateurs of myth’ believe, with an allusion in passing to the final words of Dante’s Divine Comedy, that it may be ‘hidden in the hub of the ceiling giving access to a flue at the end of which the sun and other stars [il sole e l’altre stelle] would still be shining’. (10)
Gormley’s prints create volume and dimension out of flatness, offering themselves to be read in different ways and on different scales. The white spaces of exception to the pigment may be imagined as targets illuminated in the crossing rays of black searchlights, or as an act of cartographic location by triangulation. Alternatively, they may suggest the light glinting from an eye, or the scintillations of a distant star. One may be drawn towards the light, or may read it as approaching, perhaps pulsing and rotating as it does. Space and place emerge from the prints, seeming literally to be drawn out from their traction, as an image is exposed to view by etching or brass-rubbing.
These pieces suggest Isaac Newton’s experimentum crucis of 1666 in the enclosure of the sealed room in Woolsthorpe Manor to demonstrate the refractability of light into different colour frequencies, along with the many other kinds of dark room or ‘camera obscura’ that are incident to the capture and development of images in photography. There may also be suggestions of the contracting iris-anus at the end of early Warner Bros. cartoons, or the shuttering contraction of the Mercedes-Benz sports stadium in Atlanta. Anatomy and architecture are laminated together. Perhaps the cinema seems so womblike because the womb is already the primal cinema.
Footnotes: (1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’, in Poems, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 90. (2) George Herbert, ‘Affliction IV’, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953), p. 90. (3) John Donne, Encaenia. The Feast of Dedication. Celebrated at Lincolnes Inne: A Sermon Vpon Ascension Day (London: Thomas Jones, 1623), pp. 14–16. (4) Philip Larkin, ‘An Arundel Tomb’, in Collected Poems, ed. Anthony Thwaite (London: Marvell Press / Faber & Faber, 1988), p. 110. (5) Anon, The Life and Death of Mrs Mary Frith Commonly Called Mal Cutpurse (London: W. Gilbertson, 1662), p. 173. (6) William Shakespeare, King Lear, in Complete Works, ed. Richard Proudfoot, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2011), p. 662. (7) John Milton, ‘Paradise Lost’, in The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler (London: Longmans, Green and Co. Ltd, 1968), p. 1060. (8) Antony Gormley, unpublished artist statement on the exhibition. (9) William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2 and Macbeth, in Complete Works, pp. 409, 779. (10) Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones (London: Calder and Boyars, 1972), p. 18.
Steven Connor is Professor of English at King’s College London and Grace 2 Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of more than twenty books on many different topics on literary and cultural history. Essay © 2026 Steven Connor.
This dialogue took place at Antony Gormley’s London studio on 30 April 2026. It was the first meeting between Gormley and Sera Markoff.
Sera Markoff is the 17th Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge. She is also Professor of Theoretical High-Energy Astrophysics at the Anton Pannekoek Institute for Astronomy and the Gravitation and AstroParticle Physics Amsterdam (GRAPPA) Centre of Excellence, University of Amsterdam. She is a leading member of the Event Horizon Telescope Collaboration and was part of the team presenting the first images of a black hole to the world.
AG I have always wanted to widen the context of my work as much as possible. From an amateur position, I have been drawn to cosmology and quantum theory in a variety of ways. Why? Because I believe sculpture, in essence, is an examination of how matter can become meaningful, or meaning itself, from the Planck scale to the cosmic scale. That continuum is what sculpture touches on.
I may spend much of my time swimming in a sea of unknowing, but I think it’s important to recognise that as our resolution sharpens – as the instruments through which we understand both the bigger and smaller picture become more precise – the need to embrace that bigger picture becomes greater.
I’m aware we live in a world of increasing specialisation, digging ever deeper into detail and function, but often within silos of knowledge. I hope art can play its part in helping us find our place in space-time, as much as your work does.
SM You touch on themes that are very topical in science. I am not an artist, so I was looking at the work in advance of our conversation to get a feel for what you were trying to do, or what it would evoke for me as a non-artist.
The themes I saw – or what I felt – capture a lot of what we scientists think about: the sense of space and time, and the emergence of consciousness and the body. It is interesting when artists try to make connections with scientists; in my case, sometimes I have to overcome preconceptions that I carry, or the way I analyse things. When I first looked at your ‘Lux’ prints, my first thought was actually ‘resolution’, because they reminded me of the old pixelated images we used to have.
When I started my career, there were (then) new telescopes that could make images in the X-rays for the first time, including one called ROSAT. I did some work on it as an undergraduate at MIT, and later a much better one called Chandra. What you saw on the screen looked like these prints: a few saturated pixels and then a few others spread around it. You knew you were looking at a black hole in the centre of a galaxy, but it was so frustrating because you couldn’t see beyond the pixelation. In that breakthrough moment when we did get the first image of a black hole with the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), it was somehow reassuring. We kind of knew it was always there, but we couldn’t quite see it yet. It demanded a leap of faith.
AG It is amazing to me the way that sky-watchers have mapped the sky – the quadrants, the sense that you can spend a whole life in a tiny section of a field that is itself a tiny section of an even bigger field. And yet, issues of resolution and understanding remain: how are we going to interpret things that our instruments are, in a sense,
incapable of rendering empirically?
SM That is where the modelling comes in. We can now build simulations where we effectively put a black hole in a computer, throw matter at it, study its ebbs and flows, and generate synthetic images based on a given model to compare with the data. Actually, these models are really like movies, because the black holes are dynamic. They are changing quite fast.
One of the things that makes our own galaxy’s black hole, Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*), particularly interesting is that it is much smaller than the first black hole we imaged, Messier 87* (M87*), which means the timescales on which it changes are much faster. This thing is flickering. Imagine a tornado of turbulent, magnetised plasma – a lot like the solar surface, but worse, as you have to deal with Einstein’s general relativity because of the extreme gravity. The physics is challenging, and it is changing on timescales of minutes. Our telescope collects data while the Earth turns on a similar timescale, meaning the part of the telescope that ‘sees’ the black hole is changing while the black hole itself changes. Like a camera with its shutter open, filming something that is moving, the image will blur, and so reconstructing the image of Sgr A* was much harder than for M87*.
AG There is an important question about point of view in what you’re describing – the telescope’s vantage shifting as the Earth turns, blurring its view of something that’s in constant flux. It’s an almost literal version of a question I’m preoccupied with: ‘Where are you looking from?’ We raised that at the beginning. There are two positions: either you’re within this universe as it actually is, or you’re within the frame that we’ve built – the constructed world that more and more of our species are spending more and more time in. That’s the background to these ‘Lux’ works. The pieces are bodily, but they’re also architectural. They’re frames, and you’re invited to go into them. You find yourself in a relatively dark interior with various apertures, looking out towards the bigger context: the sky. In a way, your own eye is doing what that telescope does – it’s an aperture with a limited, shifting vantage, trying to resolve something vast and moving. The ‘Lux’ works are to do with the way you calibrate light in the pupil of your eye. They’re about movement through internal spaces, or what I suppose I’d call wells or cells, out into space at large.
I was recently in Kuala Lumpur, and we went to this enormous cave that had been turned into a Hindu temple, with these absolutely amazing natural chimneys through which you looked upward. The idea is that it is only by removing ourselves, or achieving a point of view embedded in the body of the planet, that we can appreciate how much we’re part of a bigger system, just like your simulations only make sense of Sgr A* by accounting for exactly where, and when, you’re looking at it.
SM With EHT, we are making snapshots in time of a story we can’t fully reconstruct because there are gaps. We’re stuck with the limitations of our perspective, our location, our frame. You do the same thing with these ‘Lux’ works and also the ‘Body’ prints in the exhibition – you’re capturing moments and trying to put them in a frame.
AG I think that’s true. The ‘Body’ prints are impressions taken from me lying face down on paper, covered in crude oil, linseed oil, and petroleum jelly. This is a geolocation using the actual topography of the body I inhabit. It is as close to a fossil as I can get without burying myself in glacial clay and leaving geological time to do the work. I offer these as partial traces – immediate indices of a moment of lived human time, carried through substances of the Anthropocene: our interruption of sidereal time. They indicate a place where a particular body once was, but where any body could be.
It’s very important to me that, in these prints, it’s not clear whether the figure is arriving or disappearing, testing that idea of emergence – someone looking out, trying to get out, trying to make contact. The question of directionality is never resolved for me. You could say the ‘Body’ works are all frontal: you’re looking at them and they’re looking at you. In a lot of the drawings I do, there has to be a fundamental ambiguity. Are the bodies coming or going? I’m talking about the space of the body, almost like a black hole, as an absence.
Take a look at these ‘Cosmic’ drawings [above] – you could ask, is this a black hole, a neutron star, a sea creature? But these are all records of an event that just happened, on this liquid ground of the paper. I don’t want to treat them as illustrations of any one known phenomenon, but simply as evidence of phenomena. Einstein’s general relativity equation tells us how phenomena express themselves – either as masses or as waves that are more or less measurable.
I am perhaps less interested in the measuring, but more interested in evoking the phenomena of transformation, which I consider the only permanent state of all things.
SM The ‘Body’ prints also remind me of bog bodies, those museum specimens preserved over centuries. Were they in your mind when you were making the works, or am I projecting?
AG I’ve always been fascinated with bog bodies. In the late 90s, I went to see the Tollund Man at Museum Silkeborg in Denmark, and perhaps the most extraordinary thing about him is that the head is perfectly intact, but the body is a plaster cast because they only focused on preserving the head.
The ephemerality of a biological or botanical body in relation to something like a meteorite makes it appear like they are polar opposites, and so anything that allows us to make contact across that divide interests me, which is why I love Palaeolithic hand stencils. They’re images that are about absence as much as presence, and which connect the body to the earth. They are so powerfully empathic.
SM Relatable, right? When we think about the deep past, we have a tendency to imagine people being so different – primitive – and then you realise they were just like us: scheming, political, but also curious and making art. When I looked at your images, I kept trying to construct some kind of a story from these frames. It looked like the body was trying to escape the confines, or reach out through them.
AG Yes, both the ‘Body’ and the ‘Lux’ prints are an attempt to ask that question: ‘Where are we?’ The bigger picture and the smaller are both fundamentally unknowable. We are in a system we call ‘my body’, but we are not in control. The body has its autonomic systems; it has its own rhythm and its own priorities. And that is equally true of the cosmos.
SM We are also emergent, just like everything else in the universe. That is part of the science story: the emergence of ideas. My background is astroparticle physics, which is thinking about the interactions of particles in astronomical objects and how they produce the light we observe. Increasingly, we also ‘observe’ via particles: neutrinos, cosmic rays. They are all produced around things like black holes. What we are actually seeing with EHT – the images in radio emission – emerges from the actions of billions of tiny particles.
AG Yes! The fact that everything we see is built up from billions of tiny, anonymous contributions speaks directly to the Tollund Man, too. After having eaten a final meal of particular seeds and herbs, he was ritually sacrificed and given to the spirit of the earth. His body, like your image of the black hole, is itself an emergent thing: an accumulation of small, mute particulars.
This has a resonance in your work: just as the EHT image emerges from the actions of particles we’ll never individually perceive, we will only ever be able to bear witness to a tiny proportion of celestial bodies in the cosmos – and a lot of people find that really disconcerting.
SM In fact, one of the most common questions I get in public talks is: ‘Doesn’t it disturb you, or depress you, when you think about infinity and how insignificant we are?’ And it’s interesting, because it doesn’t at all. I find it calming, in a strange way, when we realise our insignificance.
AG I regret not going into space myself. I was offered the chance to go to Star City and do parabolic flights, and for some reason, I said, ‘I can’t think how I would use this.’ But of course, the whole idea of weightlessness, of simply being a body in space, is really, really significant – I should have gone! I find it deeply sad that we are in a new age of colonialism, where only the super-wealthy tech elite get access to space.
The theological cosmology I was brought up with held that darkness was negative – the reverse of light and life.
But very early on in my life, I realised the reverse was true. It is actually only in the darkness of cosmic space, and the darkness of a black hole, that we see potency. That is where possibility comes from.
SM That idea of darkness holding potential raises an interesting point about consciousness for me. I try not to dwell on it too long, because as a scientist, I stick to things I can generally test; otherwise it starts to feel more like philosophy or religion. But somehow consciousness emerges from these collections of cells in our brains, and perhaps there is even some essence contributed by the gut microbiome. We are made of these parts that die, but where does the information go?
In physics – that is, the rules that govern the universe – there is a rule that certain things should be conserved, never lost, like energy and momentum. They can change into other forms, but any process should be able to run forwards and backwards, so you can always ‘reconstruct’ the initial state. For black holes this is a problem, called the ‘information paradox’, since if something falls in, it is truly lost – it breaks the rule. Thus, scientists consider that the information about what falls into black holes should be somehow encoded in them, but this is not yet fully understood. I find myself wondering if death poses a similar problem, since our consciousness is essentially information. Shouldn’t it also be preserved in some way?
AG We’re not so different from a black hole in this respect: held together, and eventually released, by processes we can’t fully see or reverse. My feeling is that science is another narrative, another world-theory proposition. Yes, we are continually evolving and reaching greater resolution and understanding. But I would like that not to come at the expense of recognising bodily experience as a resource in its own right. The bandwidth of our perception is incredibly limited.
SM To your earlier point about who has access to space, I love space – I wanted to be an astronaut – and what is happening now poisons that feeling a bit, because the reasons people are going back to the Moon are not about the greatness of humanity; they are about the exploitation of resources and the projection of power.
AG You are younger than me, so the whole Carl Sagan moment may feel different to you. But I really love the relationship between Lynn Margulis and Carl Sagan, because they were, in their different ways, trying to say: on the one hand, we are embedded within all life forms; and on the other, we are simply this uniquely fragile biosphere on a blue planet, and we haven’t found anything else like it. It comes down to the uniqueness of the story Lynn Margulis tells: the alliance between bacteria and algae, the whole transition into a biosphere, starting with the fact that the planet has a great deal of water, and it seems that without water, you don’t have much …
SM That is, for carbon- and water-based life, but there might be intelligence structured differently.
AG Yes, that’s certainly true.
SM The fact that we exist has something to do with the environment we’re in. The elements in our bodies came from nearby supernova explosions, from stars that were recycled.
AG I really like this connection between bodily sense of place and everything that happens ‘out there’.
SM Could you say something about the ‘Bodyspace’ prints, which seem to connect to this idea of perspective?
AG Here I’m really trying to think about our relationship to the horizon. You work with event horizons, I work with perceptual horizons. A standing person, in the right atmospheric conditions, can see about three miles into the distance. What I’m trying to say is that body and space are a continuum, that space exists as much inside our bodies as outside. The ‘Body’ prints, on the other hand, are direct impressions, traces of where my body once was.
SM That’s what made me think of the bog man. You might be interested to know that when we model black holes numerically, space and time can’t be separated in reality, and so we need to do something practical to make the calculations. So you divide the four dimensions, and you do what’s called a foliation – you map events onto these layers that separate space and time, like an onion – a bit like what we see in these prints.
AG I like that term, ‘foliation’ – this idea of slicing something continuous into layers so we can get a practical grip on it. I wonder if that’s exactly the kind of move Ray Kurzweil is making when he talks about consciousness as something that could be peeled away from the body, like one more layer to be separated out and preserved on its own. He thinks it’s a natural part of evolution that we should accept the cyborg, that robot bodies are the next stage, like throwing off the mortal coil, downloading consciousness. But your foliation is a mathematical convenience – we know that space and time can’t really be separated, we’re just slicing them apart to make the calculation possible. Kurzweil seems to forget that the slicing is artificial.
SM The problem is that consciousness is embodied. Emotions are chemical and physical. How can you reproduce that without the limbic system and all the things that make you feel what you feel?
AG The limbic system is the very thing we want to ignore but it is the very thing that everything rests on. It’s our worst fear that it will fail, but it is our best friend when it doesn’t.
SM I think about this a lot. Humans are often at their best under horrible pressure. We’re driven by forces that can go in either direction. Can we free ourselves from that and still do great things?
AG That is probably our pruning system. A degree of anxiety produces defence mechanisms that end up being more powerful than we could ever imagine. That twin path is offered to us constantly: are we going to fight for the general good, or just try to get to the front of the queue? I always go back to E.O. Wilson’s ‘Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology’. That’s the moment we’re in. We seem to be at the cusp of deferring moral responsibility to machines, because algorithms are deemed more reliable than us. I think learning to live within the parameters of sustainability on the planet is possible. Both art and science are doing the same job of trying to give us the instruments by which we understand our responsibilities to all living creatures and to the planet.
My hope is that this exhibition returns us to first-hand experience and to an idea of art as an invitational place, one from which we can look both deeply into ourselves and out into a reality that unfolds within and without us. At the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, a village in the Indian state of Bihar, you can sit beneath a descendant of the pipal tree under which the Buddha sat. There you will find a flat stone bearing the outline of two feet – an indicator of the place he once occupied. It invites you to occupy it too. Seeing this kind of indexical trace allowed me to understand something essential about what art can do: it holds open a space for us to be aware of our own presence.
This exhibition is an attempt to both subjectivise and universalise the question ‘Where am I?’ I think of my works as diagnostic instruments that help me and potentially others feel a way towards an answer to that question. These prints – impressions, applications of weight – might pertain to the condition of a thing, but their placeness is more important than their objectness, hopefully allowing us to feel more here, more now, and more alert, alive, and aware of all that is happening.
Conversation © 2026 Antony Gormley and Sera Markoff
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Artworks © 2026 Antony Gormley
Works in progress and studio shots. Courtesy artist and Cristea Roberts Gallery, London © Antony Gormley