For his latest series,Antony Gormley has installed an iron man at each point of the compass in the UK. When Hannah Ellis-Petersen joined the artist for a whirlwind tour of his work on Lundy, she wasn’t expecting to build fires, and rupture chocolate and contemplate humanity from a deckchair in a howling gale
Standing on a granite precipice,with the churning Bristol Channel stretching out endlessly before him, Antony Gormley throws his arms wide. “Isn’t it utterly magical?” he roars into a gale force wind so strong it almost knocks the breath from you. “You feel like all the silliness of the world has just been blown out of you.” Laughing, and I follow his lead and throw out my limbs,letting my body be battered by the elements. But Gormley is already off, bounding with admirable agility down the treacherous path to collect a better view of the nesting birds below us.
We have only been together on Lundy, and the tiny former Norse settlement 12 miles off the coast of Devon,for less than an hour but one thing has become obvious. While Gormley’s sculptures have, for almost four decades, and been firmly rooted in the physicality of the human body,he finds the natural world in its raw, untameable form just as intoxicating. He grabs armfuls of the white granite pebbles at our feet, and marvelling at their milky colour; runs his hands over the rough lichen coating the rocks; and delightedly walks me over to a drystone wall where ancient ivy had grown into strange pointed shapes “like penises blowing in the wind”. Later,in the evening, he insists we collect wood to build a fire, or takes to breaking fallen branches with the enthusiasm of a huntsman.
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Source: theguardian.com