The Norfolk landscape, on England’s North sea coast, is famously flat. Or so it appears until you spend time with Antony Gormley’s latest installation, spread across 300 acres of parkland near King’s Lynn. Its 100 life-size sculptures of the artist’s naked form, now familiar, are almost identical. Moulded in cast iron from his tall body, each stands upright and still, eyes closed, hands pointing down towards the earth.
The casting marks on the bodies might evoke a tribe of cyber men. Yet the seeming uniformity alerts the viewer to their difference. Only a few stand with feet on the ground. Most are partially buried, some up to knees or neck, while 20 are raised on concrete plinths of up to four meters. In fact, all are standing on the same horizontal plane, at a fixed distance from sea level or the Earth’s core. The variations in height draw attention to undulations in the planet’s surface that are barely perceptible. If you position yourself at the correct level and turn 360 degrees, you look a number of these iron men — both sunken and elevated — directly in the eye.
This is conceptual art that is also visceral. To roam among these enigmatic figures on their fixed plane is to be made thrillingly aware of their — and our own — relation to the Earth, of the deep geological time that carved out the contours of this landscape, of topography refashioned not only by nature but by human design and, at times, inhuman labour. Shifting with the play of sunlight, shade and breeze, this heightened meditative experience is enhanced by natural phenomena — from morning mist and birdsong to pale fallow deer and the fragrance of mown grass. Even the sculptures’ orange rust and white streaks of bird droppings add to the benediction.
Gormley’s “Time Horizon” at Houghton Hall and Gardens is the first UK showing of a work originally staged in southern Italy in 2006. But these Norfolk figures were specially cast in a West Midlands foundry from 23 different moulds created over a year. After favouring digital scans for speed, “I had my first full body casting for 18 years last summer,” the artist, who has a house nearby, tells me while revisiting the work. It took five months to install and opened in the spring.
The Palladian Houghton Hall was built in 1722 by Britain’s first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, as, Gormley says, the “English Versailles”. An ancestor of the Norfolk squire had been elevated by the Crusades (hence the ubiquitous “Saracen’s head” in the decor). In the arcade beneath the state rooms, a Gormley sculpture buried up to its thighs — the only one inside the house — sets the datum level for the 99 outside. There was no compromise with this crucial “anchor”. Rather than cheat by cutting it in half, Gormley says, “we removed the stone flags then drilled down,” allowing the whole sculpture with its supporting plinth to be lowered into the hole up to its groin. The 18th-century flagstone plug, cut out by water jet, will be replaced when the work closes.
Virtually all the arcade furniture has been removed, leaving stags’ heads above the four fireplaces. The front and back doors have been flung open, creating a clear view through the house, interrupted only by the Beckettian figure protruding through the floor. “We’ve perforated the mirage,” Gormley says, “and with it, its pomp and circumstance.”
The 1994 Turner prizewinner, who was knighted in 2014, has positioned his art against classical sculpture’s projection of power and idealised beauty. Although he remains best known for the gigantic “Angel of the North” (1998), many of his installations are cast from his own body — from “Another Place”, installed since 2005 on Crosby Beach in Merseyside, or “Another Time” (2017), emerging at low tide in Margate, to “Event Horizon”, first shown on London’s urban skyline in 2007. Yet “I don’t think of them as me,” he says. “They’re a particular example of the common human condition, not a cipher or symbol.” His starting point as an artist is the body he happens to inhabit, not as image or — as is sometimes charged — patriarchal icon, but as a site of feeling and experience.
Gormley gestures at the pediment above Houghton Hall, with its statue of Demosthenes, defender of liberty, flanked by Minerva and Justice. Identifying Demosthenes with Walpole, he says, “Robert’s dressed in a toga at the apex. He’s marble; I’m iron.” Whereas “bronze or marble have been the principal carriers of the statue,” his iron men are not statues but “players”. Each weighing 640kg, they are inserted as catalysts into the landscape to “interrogate the surface of things”, rather like acupuncture needles in a body.
First surveyed and 3D-mapped with drones, the site was tested with theodolites. Although the figures seem randomly oriented, none face each other. Inspired by youthful Buddhist meditation in India, the artist sees their stillness as reinforcing contemplative awareness in the viewer. Walking from the curved ha ha, with its hidden trench sundering lawn from wilderness, along pleached-lime-tree avenues to the highest plinths in the sunken walled garden, he points out subtle variations in the forms — from a more relaxed position of the hands to fuller lungs.
As Daisy Hildyard’s catalogue essay notes, the iron men’s industrialised production mirrors the industry that lies beneath this patch of English countryside. The doors are “made of some of the first mahogany to be felled in the West Indies”, Gormley says, alluding to Walpole’s links to slavery and enrichment in the South Sea Bubble. Locally, too, “hundreds worked in the house. The eastern prospect was excavated by hand. There are many injustices in relation to these historical structures.” The Marquess of Cholmondeley, resident owner and enthusiastic host of contemporary exhibitions since 2015, shared with him Walpole’s maps of acquisition of neighbouring land.
David Cholmondeley, who restored the hall’s 18th-century formal gardens over 25 years, says: “Now it looks like it’s always been here.” Yet for Gormley, while Houghton projects power and permanence as it was built to do, its impermanence relative to geological time is part of the point of “Time Horizon”.
Gormley’s “intervention” coincides with that of Magdalene Odundo, a Kenya-born artist whose sinuous ceramics, with protrusions resembling navels, nipples or vertebrae, are intimate links between the clay-earth and the human body. Removing one of a pair of Chinese porcelain cranes from the Green Velvet Bedchamber, Odundo replaces it with an ‘Untitled’ (1995) terracotta vase with a birdlike arched neck, creating a stunning and inquisitive duet.
“The Falcon cannot hear the falconer” (2024), a wedding-cake-like folly in ochre-and-black jasperware, stands on the Marble Parlour dining table. Cast from historic moulds during a residency at the Wedgwood archive, its totems of enslavement are joined by profiles of the abolitionist Wedgwood and the writer Olaudah Equiano, and topped by an image of a Kenyan woman in recent tax protests. Insistently linking the past to the present, Odundo’s centrepiece crowns both of these artists’ gracious but forceful dialogues with the stately home.
‘Time Horizon’ to October 31; ‘Magdalene Odundo’ to September 29. houghtonhall.com
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