Antony Gorm­ley
Fir­ma­ment IV

FIR­MA­MENT IV is a sin­gle sub­stan­tial sculp­tur­al instal­la­tion that tests and responds to the archi­tec­tur­al lim­its of the gallery space con­struct­ed with­in the his­toric Carriageworks.

It is a sin­gle ​‘expand­ed field’ con­struct­ed from 1030 x 150 mm diam­e­ter steel balls and 1849 steel ele­ments, weld­ed togeth­er to cre­ate a non-reg­u­lar, polyg­o­nal struc­ture whose form dis­solves and resolves through­out the gallery. Huge in scale, mea­sur­ing 20 x 12.6 x 8.4 meters, and built in situ so that it push­es hard up against the edges of the gallery space, the instal­la­tion is an assem­bled matrix of vol­umes that map a celes­tial con­stel­la­tion while also imply­ing the form of a body lost with­in it. With its graph­ic out­line, FIR­MA­MENT IV, the fourth in a series of works that attempt to map space, is the most mon­u­men­tal to date using ele­ments that engage bold­ly with both the viewer’s body and with shared space.

The result­ing web could be con­strued as an expand­ed dia­gram of micro­scop­ic min­er­al struc­tures as much as a con­densed and domes­ti­cat­ed map of the heav­ens. At times the work feels claus­tro­pho­bic, at oth­ers it comes across as a land­scape-like ges­tur­al drawing.

Gormley’s work has always been about per­cep­tion, test­ing what the expe­ri­ence of our phys­i­cal pres­ence in cer­tain con­di­tions of time and space. In this instal­la­tion, the view­er is asked to con­tin­u­al­ly read­just their rela­tion­ship to the field as it is navigated.

The work was devel­oped with Tris­tan Sim­monds and builds upon the col­lab­o­ra­tion that has been devel­op­ing rapid­ly in the last three years with major projects all over the world.