Science was the means by which the centrepiece of the exhibition, also called Blind Light, existed. Thanks to clever environmental control, it was effectively a cloud confined in a room, and made for a disorientating sensory experience. However, as a physicist I was more interested in Drawn, a room with each corner occupied by an iron figure made from a cast of Gormley’s body. The pose struck was arms above the head and legs akimbo at 90°, so that the limbs could lie along the axes of the corners. In the exhibition book Gormley says that he wants this work to make the viewer “more uncertain about his or her position in space and gravitational value”. Seeing human forms “sitting” quite happily on the ceiling certainly does give you a strong sense of not knowing which way is up, but for me the figures were like the atoms at the corners of a unit cell. Suddenly I found myself standing inside the very thing I was trying to get away from, but I was loving it. My fascination with the structure of solids had been reborn.
The forms within forms of the Matrices and Expansions collection of hanging works were, not surprisingly, inspired by geometry. Viewing from many different angles revealed a human figure trapped inside each stainless-steel doodle of polyhedral outlines, picked out by a denser arrangement of the wiring. Quantum Cloud, which is on permanent display at Greenwich, has the same idea. This and other works not featured in this exhibition, such as Meniscus, Critical Mass, Cell Cycle III and Chromosome, take titles or ideas from science. I will be interested to see what other links this multifaceted mind will produce in the future.
Another work in the exhibition with a physics connection was Capacitor—a figure made from thousands of steel tubes, some containing rods which protrude from the body, creating a voodoo-doll like structure. The body at the centre of the piece is, according to the exhibition guide, “a core at the centre of a field, but it is not clear whether this is expanding or contracting; a big bang or a black hole”. I began to realise Gormley might have a large collection of popular science books.