Antony Gormley's 'Field for the British Isles' sculpture

'Field for the British Isles' by Antony Gormley exhibitied in St.Helens College between 20th - 23rd August 2008. The world famous 1994 Turner Prize winning terracotta army of 40,000 figurines of variable sizes between 8 and 26cm tall, crafted in St.Helens by local people, is now owned by London's Hayward Gallery.

Field for the British Isles was typical in recruiting some 100 volunteers from the pupils and their extended families, of two local schools in St.Helens. Each volunteer was given a portion of the 30 tonnes of clay required, along with some loose instructions specifying the rough size and proportions for the figures. An accidental feature of the original Field was that the Texca family involved people aged from 6 to 60 working on the figures, and Gormley felt that the involvement of three generations of a family should be continued in all the subsequent versions.
Gormley has also made several other works entitled Field, but these are smaller groups of life size figures more typical of Gormley's earlier work.

This artwork has been installed and displayed at various locations. The specific configuration is changed to suit each location, but the miniature figures are always placed to form a dense carpet with each figure looking towards the viewer. Ideally the Field is extended through a doorway or round a corner, so that the figures going out of sight leave the impression of an unlimited horde.

Antony Mark David Gormley OBE (born 30 August 1950) is an English sculptor. His best known works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead and Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool.

Born the youngest of seven children, Gormley grew up in a well off family in Hampstead. Gormley studied at Ampleforth College. He also studied at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1968 to 1971 before going to India and Sri Lanka to study Buddhism from 1971 to 1974. From 1974 onwards, he attended various colleges in London, completing his studies with a postgraduate course in sculpture at the Slade School of Art, University College London between 1977 and 1979. His career was given early support by Nicholas Serota who had been a near contemporary of Gormley's at Cambridge giving him a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981.

Almost all of his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal casts.

Gormley describes his work as "an attempt to materialise the place at the other side of appearance where we all live." Many of his works are based on moulds taken from his own body, or "the closest experience of matter that I will ever have and the only part of the material world that I live inside." His work attempts to treat the body not as a thing but a place and in making works that enclose the space of a particular body to identify a condition common to all human beings. The work is not symbolic but indexical - a trace of a real event of a real body in time.

Gormley won the Turner Prize in 1994 with Field for the British Isles.

The 2006 Sydney Biennale featured Gormley's Asian Field, an installation of 180,000 small clay figurines crafted by 350 Chinese villagers in five days from 100 tons of red clay. Also in 2006, the burning of Gormley's 25-metre high "The Waste Man" formed the zenith of the Margate Exodus.

He is currently a trustee of the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art and (since April 2007) of the British Museum.

Antony Gormley's website is: www.antonygormley.com