Antony Gormley, British sculptor, about his work, The Infinite Cube
Gabriel Mitchell was obsessed in a poetical and mathematical way with “grid theory”. He saw it as a matrix through which to view the world. Combining both Ptolemic mathematics and structural theory he approached the grid as a conceptual matrix to register experience. There is a sense of humour and a totality to the way in which he pursued his research and I consider the “cosmic infinity cube” as the culmination of his many investigations. It had to be made.
In my work I have constantly tried to apply objective mapping to subjective experience and I
continue to employ the orthogonal structures of modernity in order to measure both body and space. With this Cube, Gabriel calls on both the possibility and terror of an absolute order. The Cube places 1000 points of light set into a regular grid within a mirrored cube. This is a universe that is, like ours, ever expanding but without gravity, a universe of seeds of light that progress outwards with the illusion of infinite extension. The core of the paradox is that this infinity is held within a regular cube of an imperial yard, a measure that derives from the body, that allows an infinity, but at the scale of the intimate.
The domain of sculpture is space, it attempts to catalyse it, to engage us in it, through mass, time and an appeal to first-hand experience, but this small cube is, in some way, an inversion of culpture’s role in the physical world and gives us a void, never inhabitable but calls on us to imaginatively engage in a three dimensional perceptual field with shifting infinities that constantly move with us.
