Deep in the lush countryside of Wonju, South Korea, is a domed cave that looks out on to a mountain ridge. Seven rust-red figures, composed of stacked iron blocks, pose in the space: sat up, laid flat or hunched over.
The only illumination comes from the mouth of the cave and an oculus carved into its roof. When it is sunny, light from the oculus slowly makes its way across the polished concrete floor; in other seasons, wind, insects, leaves and snow will all drift in.
“People were just in there lying or sitting on the floor,” says Antony Gormley, as we talk in his airy London drawing studio, “watching the landscape through the curtain of rain, listening to the wind in the trees.”
The sculptor collaborated with the architect Tadao Ando to create the subterranean space Ground for Museum SAN, beneath the gallery’s flower garden. “Ando-san and I bonded over our mutual love for the Pantheon, a 2,000-year-old concrete dome that is still intact and still the ur-building of all buildings,” he says.
Ground, which opened this summer, encapsulates Gormley’s instant appeal. The Turner Prize-winning sculptor’s catalogue, often drawing on casts or scans of his own body — his industrial colossus The Angel of the North, which stands on the mound of a former coal mine looming over the A1, or the 100 silent sentinels looking out to sea in Another Place at Crosby Beach, Merseyside — proves his eye for evocative settings.
