How sculpture has shaped the world for thousands of years

In a new book, Antony Gormley and Martin Gayford, an artist and a critic, wrestle with the meaning of one of humanity’s oldest and most important art forms

Gormley with his artwork ‘Object, 199’, a life-size iron sculpture cast from the artist’s body and hung from the ceiling of the National Portrait Gallery in 2016 (Getty)

Shaping the World is a book that grew out of conversations between Antony Gormley, a leading contemporary artist, and the writer and critic Martin Gayford. Its subtitle is Sculpture From Prehistory to Now – but the subject is even wider than that suggests. One of the authors’ basic contentions is that altering matter to give it meaning has been fundamental to human life for at least as long as language. As Gormley argues: “Sculpture is a form of physical thinking. That’s its nature. It’s like alchemy: it works by changing a lump of clay or stone into something utterly different. Its basic premise is rather like that old saying: matter matters most. In this virtual digital age, it remains a vital way of questioning the world that we have made and the earth we made it out of.”

Chronologically Shaping the World ranges from deep in the past until 2020, works by almost all cultures are included, and it deals with idioms as diverse as megalithic standing stones and performance art. The following discussion centres on two crucial themes. Firstly the power of a shaped object such as a stone carving to resist (and embody) time; secondly, the way in which even in contemporary art, sculpture still retains fetishistic power.

Antony Gormley