Antony Gormley’s sculptures focus on the dynamic relationship between the human body and the space it inhabits, probing wider concerns about our place within nature and the universe. In the complex interrelation between the blocks that comprise Big Gauge II, the artist also turns the gaze inwards, exploring and exposing the body as a ‘place’ and ‘site’ within its own right: the site for the self. Throughout his wide-ranging career, Gormley has worked from casts of his own body – literalising the concept of a body as a habitat, a ‘case’ for a human being: 

‘I started out with the idea of building with physical pixels, but the small blocks turned into ever bigger blocks and description gave way to the realisation that th♚e way one block sat on top of another could carry the feeling of inhabiting a body.  At⛄ this larger scale, what the blocks do to each other is the critical thing.

When you are standing around and doing nothing in particular, it is nice to stack your arms on top of your head. Suddenly you are a sculpture: you can feel those weights and𒁏 measures♓   ­­̶   not as they can be depicted but as they are.

Big Gauge II is made of 16 blocks similar in size to those used in building houses but here they make a body as habitat’. (Antony Gormley, text for Beyond Limits, The Landscape of British Sculpture 1950 -2015, Sotheby’s, Chatsworth House, September 20🤪15).