ANTONY GORMLEY

‘Man Rock I still looks pretty much like it did when I made it. I think the thought process at the time was to transfer this idea of a sensate skin to an inanimate rock and to see if I could do that more simply and more immediately. That resulted first of all in works called Grasp – single stones with simply the outline of my hand carved into them. I often repeated those lines inside and outside as I had with the wall drawing Exercise Between Blood and Earth (1979–81), and called that series of works Touchstones. The multiple lines gave a feeling of vibration, of a power stone. I had been entranced by the Tjurunga of the Arrernte desert people of central Australia (from the Haddon collection) that I had handled in the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology in Cambridge University; really powerful, sacred stones and objects. Just before making this work, I had been in Ireland and I'd visited Newgrange, Knowth, Dowth, the amazing Neolithic structures in the Upper Boyne Valley, Uisneach (the navel stone of Ireland), as well as well as the Turoe stone in Galway. I was very taken with the idea of the omphalos or the navel stone both being and marking a place of chthonic energy.’

From Antony Gormley and Jon Wood In Conversation, September 2021