Acclaimed artist Antony Gormley has brought 100 life-size sculptures to stunning Houghton Hall
Lead image credit: Pete Huggins
His distinctive figures are globally acclaimed – from the Angel of the North, to sculptures taking up prime position on the Water of Leith, and installations as far afield as Western Australia.
With artworks that investigate the relationship of the human body to space, Gormley’s Time Horizon installation – one of his largest-scale – will be shown for the first time in the UK. Covering 300 acres of parkland at Norfolk’s Houghton Hall and featuring 100 life-size sculptures, the spectacular installation will be staged until 31st October.
The cast-iron sculptures, each weighing 620kg and standing at an average of 191cm, are installed at the same datum level to create a single horizontal plane across the landscape. Some works are buried, allowing only a part of the head to be visible, while others are buried to the chest or knees according to the topography. Only occasionally do they stand on the existing surface. Around a quarter of the works are placed on concrete columns that vary from a few centimetres high to rising four metres off the ground.
“My ambition for this show is that people should roam far and wide, ” says Gormley. “Art has recently privileged the object rather than the experience that objects can initiate. Time Horizon is not a picture, it is a field and you are in it. The work puts the experience of the subject/visitor/protagonist on an equal footing with all material presences, organic and inorganic. The quality of the light, the time of the year, the state of the weather and the condition of your mind, body and soul are all implicated in the field, as is all the evidence within it of human activity already accomplished as well as the plethora of life forms that surround the hall.’
Houghton Hall was built by Sir Robert Walpole, Great Britain’s first prime minister, in around 1722. Designed by prominent Georgian architects Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, it is one of the country’s finest examples of Palladian architecture. Houghton and its estate passed to the Cholmondeley family at the end of the 18th Century and remains a family home. The house and award-winning gardens have been open to the public since 1976.
