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Aberystwyth University Peeling off the skin: Antony Gormley's Inside Australia Pierse, Simon Published in: Art on the Line Publication date: 2004 Citation for published version (APA): Pierse, S. (2004). Peeling off the skin: Antony Gormley's Inside Australia. Art on the Line, 1(5). http://hdl.handle.net/2160/5919 General rights Copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the Aberystwyth Research Portal (the Institutional Repository) are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the Aberystwyth Research Portal for the purpose of private study or research. • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the Aberystwyth Research Portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. tel: +44 1970 62 2400 email: [email protected] Download date: 26. Sep. 2021 Art on the line Peeling off the skin: Antony Gormley’s Inside Australia Simon Pierse University of Wales, Aberystwyth [email protected] Keywords Antony Gormley; Australia; Perth Festival; Contemporary British sculpture; Insiders; site-specific art Abstract In 2003 the Perth International Arts Festival celebrated its 50th anniversary with a commission given to renowned British artist Antony Gormley (1950 –). Gormley’s Inside Australia is an instal- lation of 51 stainless steel figures situated on Lake Ballard, a dry salt lake in a remote region of Western Australia. His initial attraction to the project was the geology and geography of Australia’s interior but when he discovered the small community of Menzies, Gormley’s ideas evolved towards an exploration of two separate concepts of interior space: one within us, the other embodied in the land. Using computer technology, Gormley made digital scans of most of the inhabitants of Menzies, reduced their lateral dimensions by two thirds and made statues based on these measurements in cast stainless steel. In the ‘chemical’ landscape of Lake Ballard, the Insiders resonate with the landscape and suggest a number of associations with indigenous art, community and culture. They promote a spiritual interaction with the landscape of interior Australia and in Gormley’s words are ‘an excuse for coming here and thinking about this place and the people who dwell in it’. A year later, Inside Australia remains in situ and there are plans to make it permanent. It promises to be another destination in the outback offering the tourist a spiritual pilgrimage into Australia’s interior. To see the desert is like peeling the skin off ied in the land. The idea, Gormley explains, a landscape – Fred Williams1 was to deal ‘with issues about individual and community, the relationship of identity to the In December 2002 Antony Gormley placed place, and the idea of who I am and how 2 an installation of 51 Insiders in a remote that’s constituted by others’. But he admits location in the interior of Western Australia. that what initially made him agree to the pro- Gormley’s Insiders are human forms ject was the ancient geology of Western scanned and cast in stainless steel alloy in a Australia: way that enables us to see them and our- These Archean rocks are between 2.5 and 2.9 selves, stripped down and reduced to essen- billion years old … In these rocks are to be tial cores of being (figure 1). The figures in found an enormous wealth of mineral deposits their setting are a marriage of sculpture and – uranium, iron, copper, and stranger, more landscape, a conflation of two concepts of recently arrived elements on the elemental the interior, one within us, the other embod- table – iridium, vanadium, molybdenum and ART ON THE LINE 2004/1 (5) 1 ART ON THE LINE Figure 1 Antony Gormley, Insider on Lake Ballard, Western Australia, 2003, stainless steel alloy. © the artist 2003. Photograph by Simon Pierse titanium. I wanted to make a new alloy based to Albany to Kalgoorlie. To festival director on high-grade stainless steel 316 that includes Seán Doran, Inside Australia is a work ‘spe- as many of these new elements as possible, a cially created for the West Australian land- kind of concentration of the elemental memo- scape’… celebrating ‘Perth Festival’s newly ry in these very old rocks …The idea of the found reach into the remoteness of its own piece is to provide a human measure for this state’.5 He underlines the creative link made geological landscape that allows viewers to between an international arts festival and ‘a walk out and sense their own bodies in space small and somewhat forgotten West and time in a way they wouldn’t normally.3 Australian community’. This is a way, not so much of putting the small town of Menzies on Gormley has had a long association with the the map, but of making a link between a rural Australian landscape. In 1989 he made two community and ‘the global art scenes’. Inside parallel works: A Room for the Great Australia, a site-specific event, located in Australian Desert and Field for the Art one of the more remote parts of the state, Gallery of New South Wales that dealt with was an attempt by the director to bring the differing notions of interior and exterior Perth International Arts Festival into its interi- space.4 Having established an international or and by extension, to bring participants in reputation in the 1980s and 1990s as an an event ‘usually associated with perfor- artist working in figural sculpture based on mance, box office and traditional tastes’ to a castings of his own body, Gormley has location in the hinterland of Western recently moved towards sculptural installa- Australia.6 tions such as Domain Field, Allotment I and In discussing the site chosen, it is neces- Allotment II that in various ways have used sary first to distinguish between Lake Ballard – the bodies of local volunteers. the actual location of the installation – and the The Perth International Arts Festival com- small town of Menzies, whose inhabitants were missioned Gormley to make the Inside scanned and eventually turned into the Insider Australia installation as part of its Golden figures. Menzies is not in fact particularly Anniversary Festival in January – February remote. It lies some 130 kilometres northwest 2003. Festival events that year extended of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, a regional centre with its throughout Western Australia, from Broome own airport, linked to Perth by rail and a good 2 ART ON THE LINE 2004/1 (5) PEELING OFF THE SKIN: ANTONY GORMLEY'S INSIDE AUSTRALIA: PIERSE road. However, Menzies does epitomise, both The symbolic geography of Lake Ballard symbolically and in a real sense, the isolated The journey to Lake Ballard, some 55 kilo- communities of inland Australia. It is an old min- metres beyond Menzies along an unsealed ing ‘ghost town’, one of several scattered about but graded gravel road, through red dirt the area surrounding Kalgoorlie; towns that country of mulga scrub, wattle and eucalypt, were quickly established and grew rapidly in a offers the visitor a real experience of outback brief boom period of prosperity following the Australia. Lake Ballard is not visible from the discovery of gold. Menzies is not just any old road but eventually reveals itself – a flat dust-blown, forgotten, outback town; it is a expanse of dry salt lake – after a short drive place with history and inhabitants who have down a track. Antony Gormley and his tried to preserve some of that history over the daughter Paloma ‘surveyed a vast area of years. It once had a population of 10,000 but Western Australia’8 whilst searching for a today this has dwindled to around 130 resi- suitable site: dents and a few public buildings: the town hall When I first came to look for a site in Western and shire office built in 1869, a hotel and the Australia, all I knew was that I wanted flatness Caltex Roadhouse. At the end of the street – a plain earth surface that connected here there is now a large sign directing the visitor to with there – the intimate with the distant. [Lake Lake Ballard. Whilst interested in the town’s Ballard] immediately seemed right because of history, it is clear that Gormley is not using it in the strong horizon but also because of the any literal way but is more concerned in the mound near the edge which could be a van- Menzies community as it is today. The relative tage point from which to view the work. That nearness of Menzies to Lake Ballard, the conical hill was also just removed enough smallness of the Menzies community and from the edge for its shadowed silhouette to Gormley’s evident enjoyment in discovering become an anchor for the whole installation.9 and engaging with it are probably the reasons that initially led him to choose the ‘Menzies Flatness, with the unique feature of the con- Mob’ as the subjects for his Insiders installation. ical hill ‘island’, a natural vantage point from Winning so many of the citizens of Menzies which to look down on the lake and the round to the idea took a good deal of gentle installation, made Lake Ballard an ideal coaxing however, and it is a tribute to choice. Once chosen, the geography of the Gormley’s strength of vision that most of the site became increasingly significant to residents were eventually persuaded to take Gormley: ‘At first I only wanted flatness but part.

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