Clasp by Antony Gormley
Clasp is an innovative and striking translation of two bodies holding one other.
The Sculpture
This 4.4-metre-high cast iron sculpture is installed on King's Walk, between the Students' Union and Northern Stage.
Antony Gormley’s Clasp is part of his ‘Double Blockworks’ series, in which rectilinear blocks replace anatomy with architectonic volumes using stacking, cantilever and propping, to create sculptures that juggle ideas of the dynamic and the stable.
The 'Double Blockworks' series is a radical departure from Gormley’s normal practice of isolating a single body in space. Many of Antony Gormley’s ‘Double Blockworks’ are based on scans of the artist clasping a previously made 'Blockwork' – a beautiful acknowledgement of his relationship with the art of sculpture.
For Gormley, the doubled figures embody "matter as a continual dance of possibility between emergence and entropy. The acknowledgement of instability and inevitable jeopardy, but, at the same time, connection. The need to stand and to hold – to touch the world, the future, another body."
Clasp is formed of 18 individual blocks and cast as one single element in Spheroidal Graphite iron. The surface colour of the sculpture will continue to naturally evolve over time as an organic response to environmental conditions
The inspiration
Gormley’s inspiration for Clasp comes from architectural structures, including the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae, the Trilithons of Stonehenge and the buildings of Mies van der Rohe.
These essential forms of architecture translate through modernism into a structure where each piece plays its part in a whole and dead weight becomes active.
Gormley states: "Two stacks of blocks find mutual support. Together, they make a concentrated, single sculpture that is both body and building."
The artist
Best known in the north of England for the Angel of the North in Gateshead and Another Place at Crosby Beach in Liverpool, Antony Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999. His sculptures can be found in museums, collections and permanent sites all over the world.
Gormley was awarded an honorary doctorate by Newcastle University in 2004. In 2015, the University's Hatton Gallery held the ‘Space Stations’ exhibition, showcasing some of his drawings from 2002–2014. These drawings reveal how drawing and sculpture have been in continuous dialogue throughout his career.
Clasp is on loan from the sculptor and forms part of the University's Art on Campus programme.
