Another Place

I have been reflecting on where the ideas behind voceti came from. The aspect of it that involves redefining landscape by 'intervening' in it was influenced by a visit to Anthony Gormley's Another Place, his installation at Crosby beach, just north of the Mersey estuary.

The sculptor outlines the idea behind the work and explains its development on his web-site:

ANOTHER PLACE, 1997

Original proposal for the Wattenmeer, Cuxhaven, Germany (1995):

"To install a hundred solid cast iron bodyforms along the coast to the west and south of the Kugelbake. The work will occupy an area of 1.75 square kilometres, with the pieces placed between 50 and 250 metres apart along the tideline and one kilometre out towards the horizon, to which they will all be facing. Depending on the fall of the land, the state of the tide, the weather conditions and the time of day the work will be more or less visible. The sculptures will be installed on a level plane attached to 2 metre vertical steel piles. The ones closest to the horizon will stand on the sand, those nearer the shore being progressively buried. At high water, the sculptures that are completely visible when the tide is out will be standing up to their necks in water.

The sculptures are made from 17 body-casts taken from my body (protected by a thin layer of wrapping plastic) between the 19th of May and the 10th of July. The sculptures are all standing in a similar way, with the lungs more or less inflated and their postures carrying different degrees of tension or relaxation."


The idea was to test time and tide, stillness and movement, and somehow engage with the daily life of the beach. This was no exercise in romantic escapism. The estuary of the Elbe can take up to 500 ships a day and the horizon was often busy with large container ships.

In the end, the piece stretched 2.5 kilometres down the coast and 1 kilometre out to sea, with an average distance between the pieces of 500 metres. They were all on a level and those closest to the shore were buried as far as their knees. The work is now permanently sited outside Liverpool on Crosby Beach, U.K.
The effect on the visitor is powerful, the statues exude an eerie calm which gives shape and meaning to the empty, semi-industrialised estuarine sands.

Looking south from the location towards the mouth of the Mersey.

The statues all stand facing the horizon

I think part of the reason why people identify with them is they are life-size , not monumental but human-scale.

A key part of the effect is how scale is manipulated; the skies are huge, the figures relatively tiny and sited  apart, each one is alone, though within sight of  the next. One senses their isolation, even though there are a hundred of them.

Light shining on the wet sand contrasts with the dull, metalic bodies.

The figures are beginning to weather, time takes its toll.

Over the flatness of the sands, from a distance it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which are statues and which are human on-lookers.

The response to the work has been almost entirely positive, despite early concerns locally. Reading through the reviews on trip advisor it is great to see a work of modern sculpture receive almost universal approval. The reasons I think are clear. First of all it is situated outside, and not in the stultifying atmosphere of an art gallery. Secondly, the individual elements are recognisible as an unadorned human form, this is figurative art, but installed into the landscape in such a way to make a powerful statement concerning the human condition which has universal appeal.

I happened to be re-reading Wordsworth's Duddon Sonnets around the time I visited Another Place; I began to wonder if you could 'install' poetry into the environment in a similar way to Gorley's figures, using recognisable form, but in a way that the juxtaposition of each poem would change the way the space it occupied was percieved by the listener.