"What is an Insider?
An Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body - attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture - to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate.
The idea is that the pieces carry in concentrated form the trace of the body and its passage through life. This has a direct relationship to pain. I see these reduced forms as antennae for a particular kind of resilience that exists within all of us, that allows us to bear suffering but is itself created through painful experience. There is no judgement about this. Their bareness is not the nakedness that reveals the flesh, it is the result of having had the flesh taken away, a loss which is not sentimentalised, but accepted. The Insider tries to up the ante between being and nothingness.
This process of objective mathematical reduction leads to a particular form of abstraction, a found object never revealed before and certainly not invented. It is a body that lies within all of us.
The Insider suggests also that the most intimate is the most strange, that inside each of us is a self that we would maybe rather not recognise and constitutes a kind of third man, the Insider as alien witness."
Antony Gormley
An Insider is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body - attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture - to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate.
The idea is that the pieces carry in concentrated form the trace of the body and its passage through life. This has a direct relationship to pain. I see these reduced forms as antennae for a particular kind of resilience that exists within all of us, that allows us to bear suffering but is itself created through painful experience. There is no judgement about this. Their bareness is not the nakedness that reveals the flesh, it is the result of having had the flesh taken away, a loss which is not sentimentalised, but accepted. The Insider tries to up the ante between being and nothingness.
This process of objective mathematical reduction leads to a particular form of abstraction, a found object never revealed before and certainly not invented. It is a body that lies within all of us.
The Insider suggests also that the most intimate is the most strange, that inside each of us is a self that we would maybe rather not recognise and constitutes a kind of third man, the Insider as alien witness."
Antony Gormley
