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Luke Morgan reviews ‘Inside Australia’ by Antony Gormley
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Imagine turning up in Menzies, 132 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie and 729 east of Perth in Western Australia, and then inviting the town’s inhabitants to take their clothes off. This is exactly what the British artist Antony Gormley did in June 2002. Improbably perhaps, after some coaxing, 131 people in Menzies, and later in Perth, agreed. Inside Australia documents Gormley’s remarkable artistic project to make and install more than fifty ‘insiders’ over ten square kilometres on Lake Ballard, a salt lake near Menzies. The first step in this process was to take full-body scans of anyone who was willing, to capture each individual’s unique three-dimensional geometry. All the scans were then ‘gormleyised’, that is, reduced by two-thirds. Next, polystyrene models were made from the digital files. Finally, metal figures were cast from the models in the VEEM foundry in Perth.

Book 1 Title: Inside Australia
Book Author: Antony Gormley
Book 1 Biblio: Thames & Hudson, $69.95 hb, 176 pp, 0500512620
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The resulting sculptures are attenuated and skeletal in appearance. They recall Giacometti’s work but have quite a different purpose and point, as the curator Anthony Bond makes clear in his essay in the volume. For Gormley, who has said, ‘I want to create a new kind of art, an anthropological art’, the participation of the Menzies community, both Aboriginal and European, male and female, young and old, was a vital part of the project as a whole. His aim was to make the interiority of a community of people linked by their mutual inhabitation of this landscape visible.

This book is a superb record of an unusually poetic work of art that deals with the local histories of human settlement in an ancient and inhospitable part of the world, the landscape and its meanings, the Dreamtime, and the simultaneous universality and idiosyncrasy of the human body.

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