12 May – 20 June 2020

In Habit was an exhibition of new sculptures and drawings by Antony Gormley, centred around a space activating installation. 

Run II was a singular, continuous, square aluminium tube that filled the space of the main gallery in snaking 90-degree turns, the horizontal sections recalling heights familiar to us in our built environment: chair or table, worktop or shelf, door or ceiling. It used the simplest means to activate and energise space, to create awareness of the way we move about in our constructed habitat.

Run II ran freely through the gallery and, by stepping through the work, our bodies were recognised and liberated from the effects of what the Japanese call the ‘culture of the chair’. Run II was, in Antony Gormley’s words, ‘a zone of reflexivity in which light, air, volume and your displaced biomass are all tuned by the orthogonal yet free play’. By encouraging you to be a figure in a ground, you became the viewed for other viewers and, in doing so, could've used the space of art as an emergent field. Gormley invited us to pause and consider our dependency on this second habitat – the ‘body of architecture’ – and to create an awareness of the ground itself, to ‘earth’ you.