ROYAL ACADEMY LOAN OF INSTALLATION WORK ‘EARTHBOUND PLANT’ BY ANTONY GORMLEY

The McDonald Institute is delighted to announce that the Council of the Royal Academy of Art has very generously allowed us to obtain, on long-term loan, the installation work ‘Earthbound Plant’ (2002) by Antony Gormley. In line with many of Gormley’s other works, this is a life-size human figure, cast from his own body. The work is being installed in the pavement area near the Institute’s buildings, where it will be buried in the ground upside down with only the soles of the feet exposed at ground level in the paving.

MTEC Freight Group, specialists in art transport, storage and exhibition services, are on site week beginning 16th March to install the casting. This will probably take about four days to complete. A formal launch will take place at 12.00 noon on Wednesday 29th April when Antony Gormley will give a brief talk, followed by a wine reception at the McDonald Institute, to which all are welcome.

Antony Gormley was born in London in 1950. Upon completing a degree in archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, Cambridge, he travelled to India, returning to London three years later to study at the Central School of Art, Goldsmiths College and the Slade School of Art.

Over the last 25 years Antony Gormley has revitalised the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material. Since 1990 he has expanded his concern with the human condition to explore the collective body and the relationship between self and other in large-scale installations like Allotment, Critical Mass, Another Place, Domain Field, and Inside Australia.

His Field has toured America, Europe and Asia. Angel of the North and, more recently, Quantum Cloud on the Thames in Greenwich are amongst the most celebrated examples of contemporary British sculpture. One of his key installations, Another Place, is to remain permanently on display at Crosby Beach, Merseyside.

He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and was made an Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1997. In 2007 he was awarded the Bernhard Heiliger Award for Sculpture. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Trinity College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge, and has been a Royal Academician since 2003.