Collection
Insider VIII
Antony Gormley (b. 1950)
Insider VIII
iron
1.86 m high
1998
Insider VIII is one of a series of fourteen works made between 1996 and 1999 in which Antony Gormley experimented with using a mathematical process to reduce reduce body mass by two-thirds to reveal an inner core. They were created at a pivotal point in the artist's career, described by Gormley as a 'terminal point in a mass/space dialectic'. The series began as an experiment into the reduction or concentration of the body that was the reverse procedure from his expansion of the body, which he explored in the late 1980s.
Gormley's Insiders carry, in concentrated form, the trace of the body and its passage through life. The material used for these works is iron, the base element found at the Earth's core, and the artist has likened the figures to being cooled and revealed magnetic lead cores of the body. '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' (Artist's statement, November 1999).
'The Insider suggests also that the most intimate is the most strange, inside all of us is a self that we would maybe not recognise and constitutes a kind of third man, the Insider as alien witness' (see J. Hutchinson (et. al.), Antony Gormley, Phaidon Press, London, 2000, p. 161).