Antony Gormley WATER II, 2018

WATER II (2018) forms part of Antony Gormley’s AGGREGATE BLOCKWORKS series, which investigates the consequences of our ability to manipulate matter. He creates these works from aggregated blocks, treating matter as information and using the language of coding to suggest both the struggle and symbiosis between body and block. The constituent blocks function to encode the form, much as individual lines of code are used to store information. Gormley is interested in the effects of the digital revolution, which has transformed the ways in which we relate to the world and to ourselves. He describes this ‘not as a noble conflict between spirit and matter, but an overturning of fixed principles that gives way to a continual and fluid translation from information into form and from form into information’.