The open space to the front of the St Pancras British Library building, known as the Piazza, is home to a number of artworks by seminal British artists, including two by sculptor Antony Gormley. 

Antony Gormley © Oak Taylor-Smith

Sir Antony Gormley, OBE, is a British sculptor best known for the Angel of the North. Jo in our Digital Engagement team spoke to him about his love of the British Library and the inspiration behind Planets and Witness, his works at our St Pancras site.

'The magic of the British Library is the way its utilitarian reserve is countered by the great battery of leatherbound books at its core. I love the idea that what is visible above ground is a small part of that which is buried below it.'

Tell us about yourself and your work

I live in a way in which work and play, if not synonymous, are woven into one another.

I like to work alone and I also like to work in company. I like to have many pots simmering. When I started, I made work on my own or with Vicken Parsons, who became my wife.

Increasingly, I began to work with others, and this became normal after the building of the studio in King’s Cross. 25 assistants work with me in London and 20 in Hexham. There is an organic culture in studio life. I really love this creative community, drawn together through the work we make together and I’m proud to say that without them, I now couldn’t do much.

All the work comes from me – literally me – standing naked in a darkened room, being scanned, or asking somebody to translate a small drawing from my Muji notebook, but the life of the studio is actually a place of collaboration and critique: a work passes through my hands and eyes as well as others, before leaving. I love the sense of things literally bubbling up out of the interaction with people, and of people with stuff.

My work comes out of life – and life, hopefully, is the receiver of it. Each work is the mother of the next work. I want to make art that is about awareness, alertness, aliveness and hopefully, it can produce those affects in those who experience it.

How did your work with the British Library come about?

I became involved with the Library through the competition for Poet's Circle. Through it I came to know and become friends with Sandy Wilson [the architect of our building in St Pancras]. He was an amazing and charming person, ever young, always seeking new inspiration and new ideas. He was open minded, grand, yet friendly.

Construction of Poet’s Circle in St Pancras, 1993

What do you love about the British Library?

I still think that the magic of the British Library is the way its utilitarian reserve is countered by the great battery of leatherbound books at its core, and the extraordinary volume and silence of the Reading Rooms. I love the idea that what is visible above ground is a small part of that which is buried below it. We now have the entire history of human knowledge accessible in the Cloud, but the British Library is a necessary objective correlative.

The Library materialises the sedimentation of knowledge. It is precious, as all libraries are precious. The decision to move the library from the round Reading Room of the British Museum to St Pancras, was important. It represented our wish for cultural continuity and evolution.

The British Library is privileged to have two of your works on display at our St Pancras site. Tell us about them.

I was very honoured to be asked to make a permanent work for the courtyard. I tried to complement its concentration on the word by celebrating something about human touch and our dependency on the palpable, material world. It was an adventure to find the eight granite stones formed through Pleistocene glaciations and a joy to see them embraced by living bodies as an acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Planets was the result.

Close up of Planets by Antony Gormley

 

Planets by Antony Gormley at the British Library

 A few years later, it was wonderful to be asked to make a work in acknowledgement of the brave writers who have witnessed political injustice and who had themselves suffered for speaking truth to power. Witness (commissioned by English PEN to mark their 90th anniversary) is an invitation for us to think of those who fight for freedom of speech and therefore put themselves at risk. I think of it as a solid foundation for the act of witness. A place to be silent and still.

Antony Gormley with his work Witness at the British Library 

How has Covid-19 changed the way you work?

Working in pandemic conditions since March 2020 has been difficult but rewarding. The ever-present deadlines for exhibitions have now been replaced by an ability to evolve and interrogate the work while living with it. There is time to listen to what the work wants us to do. We have been evolving forms that chart the body as space and evolving proposals that will invite viewers to be participants in the in animation of space.

Antony’s studio currently have their collective fingers crossed that nothing will now come between them and exhibition openings at the National Gallery of Singapore and Schauwerk Sindelfingen this summer.

And finally, what do you love about libraries?

Libraries are special places. Their atmosphere is made by the feeling of readers connecting with the insights and research of other minds from other times and places and making something new out of them.

It's been a long time since I enjoyed this feeling of doing research at university libraries in Cambridge and London: combing through the card files, identifying the books that I needed, which would then arrive at my work desk and create that special campsite of books around me that helped to make an idea, a proposition, a way of interpreting.

Libraries are precious oases of creative continuity.

Find out more about Planets

Find out more about Witness

Visit Antony Gormley’s website

In 2002, the British Library commissioned the now Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, to write a poem to mark the unveiling of Antony Gormley's sculpture, Planets.

Listen to Simon Armitage read Entrance   

Entrance

For comparison’s sake, imagine these rocks
as ova thrown from the core, as the eggs

of the Earth, rolled and revolved by time,
nagged at by air then suspended in ice

and shunted westwards in the general flow
at the pace of knowledge – glacially slow.

It’s lunchtime now, with sunlight lazing
on benches and quarried slabs, re-glazing

the Library doors. So exit the vault
of gilded words, leave the bullion of rare thoughts

and enter the dial of privacy,
the captured orbit of privet and brick

where the eight eggs of the Earth fetched up
after billions of hours, each one now etched

with a halfway-visible human form.
And yet these bodies are neither hatched nor born;

look closely – they seem to be clinging on
with gecko fingers and toes, or climbing in –

shouldering, burrowing, tunnelling through
to the inside, showing the way, as though

by doing the same we might follow them home.
They circle us, turning our minds to stone.

 

Simon Armitage

 

 

 

 

 

True Echoes is a research project centred on the British Library’s Oceanic wax cylinder collections, led by Isobel Clouter of the World and Traditional Music section.  These wax cylinders (an early medium for recording and reproducing sound) were recorded by British anthropologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Australia, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, and New Caledonia. They represent some of the earliest recordings of Oceanic oral traditions, and include music, stories, speeches and many different types of songs, including hunting songs, hymns, funeral dirges and lullabies. They are a unique representation of the cultural histories of the people of this region.

Charles Myers recording songs with Ulai and Gasu on Murray Island / Mer, Torres Strait, in 1898. Image courtesy of University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology N.23209.ACH2.

The project’s aims are twofold: to increase the recordings’ visibility and accessibility for people living in the areas in which they were made, and to enhance understanding of the collection through local knowledge and cultural memory in partnership with seven Oceanic cultural institutions.

For the Papua New Guinea collections, Research Fellow Vicky Barnecutt has been working closely with Don Niles, Acting Director of the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, on the historical research. They liaised with other researchers and institutions, and gathered all the information they could find about the recordings, the recording contexts, and the subsequent histories of the cylinders. They have created comprehensive research documents, including photographs, maps and metadata, to be used as a basis for the planned participatory research.

Due to the current restrictions on international travel, this research is taking place online. Research Fellow Rebekah Hayes has co-ordinated the launch of the project’s website, true-echoes.com, which will share the project’s research findings. Originally planned for the end of the project, its creation was brought forward so that it can act as a valuable tool during participatory research. So far, one collection has been made publically available on the website.  You can find out more at true-echoes.com and on the Sound and Vision blog.

True Echoes is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the UK Government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).

Our Collection Care team are responsible for protecting and preserving our vast collections and enabling their use, experience and interpretation. We caught up with three members of the team to find out about their work, their favourite collection items and what they’re missing about the Library during lockdown.

Tell me about your role?

Amy: I’m a Book Conservator. My job involves carrying our repair treatments to books (and sometimes maps, scrolls and other 3D items) readers have requested from the collection or that are being loaned to another organisation. I also carry out conservation work to prepare items for digitisation. When we’re open to visitors I also deliver studio tours and training courses.

Alexa: As Conservation Exhibition and Loan Manager I work closely with curators, loans registry and the wider Conservation team to prepare objects for exhibitions. This includes carrying out repairs, mounting and framing and helping with the installation process. I’ve reviewed all the collection items for our forthcoming Elizabeth & Mary exhibition. I spend a lot of my day buzzing around the storage and conservation areas of the Library discussing items, assessing their condition and suitability for display.

As well as our own exhibitions, I also look after the conservation of items going on loan to different institutions across England and internationally. I’m responsible for assessing not only the condition but also an object’s vulnerability to light, which I monitor very closely, and will recommend maximum exposure limits for each item. Due to the extensive exhibition and loan program, we tend to limit conservation work to ten hours per item. Anything requiring more treatment is suggested to go through the conservation bidding program. Due to the tight deadlines for exhibitions, the object might not be suitable for display.

Zoë: I am a Conservation Team Leader and manage a team of eight including our intern. I work with curators to discuss the treatment options for different items and make conservation recommendations and then give work to team members according to their skills and experience. I also identify staff training needs. I’m also involved with Icon, the professional body that looks after apprenticeships, training and accreditation for the industry.

How has Covid-19 changed the way you work?

Zoë: We’re usually all based in our Centre for Conservation, a purpose-built open plan workspace where we can work on treatments. We often pop over to visit curators in various storage areas around the building to discuss their objects. Covid has profoundly affected us as we don’t have access to collection items or our tools. Also, with the way we work at our workbenches it’s hard to social distance from colleagues. We’ve used lockdown to focus on research projects, examine our protocols and decision-making processes. We’ve also been talking to curators to improve decision-making for our programmes of work – it’s been an opportunity to meet new colleagues. But I can’t wait to get back to handling the collections, we’re crafty hands-on people.

Amy: I’ve been using this time to do more outreach activity such as writing Collection Care blog posts and delivering conservation training online. I really miss working collaboratively with colleagues, bouncing ideas off each other.

Alexa: Lockdown has meant that lots of exhibitions have been postponed or even cancelled. We have used this time to review and update our standard operating procedures and provided training sessions to conservation staff on the different streams of exhibition processes.

How did you get into this field?

Amy: I used to work as a Teaching Assistant and volunteered in conservation at UCL Library during the school holidays. I loved it so much I changed careers. I’ve been doing this for ten years now.

Alexa: My mum is a curator at the National Museum of Australia. I did some work experience there when I was 16 and was hooked!

Zoë: I studied sculpture at UAL: Central St Martin’s and became interested in how damage to materials tells a story. I then did a Masters degree at UAL: Camberwell College of Arts and started working at the Library 16 years ago.

What have you been working on recently?

Alexa: I have been preparing a loan for Hampton Court Palace. Their exhibition Gold and Glory: Henry VIII and the French King includes our collection items from the era of Henry VIII.

Zoë: I have been doing some research into iron gall ink, a historic brown ink.

Amy: I’ve been working on the Thomason collection of tracts, little pamphlets linked to the Civil War. These are historically bound in leather but have been heavily used. I’m repairing the paper and the bindings. These are popular items so it’s nice to be able to make them available again to Readers.

Amy’s work on the Thomason Tracts

What do you love about the Library?

Alexa: I love our studio and our team with its diverse specialisms and interests.

Zoë: For me it’s the rich depth of specialist knowledge and expertise, particularly from our curators. And I love the way we impart that knowledge in so many ways to our audiences.

Amy: I love the vibrancy and the rich programme of exhibitions. The public areas are always bustling and there’s a sense that people really enjoy visiting.

What’s your favourite object in the collection?

Ripley scroll, Sloane MS 2523B is over five metres long. This is an image of one small section.

Alexa: I get to see so much of the collection, picking one is hard! I enjoyed working with the Ripley Scrolls that was featured in the Harry Potter: A History of Magic exhibition. We have three or four versions of this with varying amounts of colour in them. They are a fascinating story around the making of the Philosopher’s Stone.

Image of the Cotton Cleopatra manuscript being worked on in studio

Zoë: Something that’s dear to me is the Cotton Cleopatra manuscript that relates to the dissolution of the monastery. There are letters from Thomas Cromwell and Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII’s correspondence showing his corrections to the terms of marriage. Also Elizabeth I’s iconic Tilbury speech to the men at the docks and its famous lines about being a female reigning monarch. It’s very fragile and I noticed how much the ink had deteriorated since it was photographed for a book. The moisture in the air had caused the paper to deteriorate.

The Tilbury Speech (before conservation)

Amy: My favourite item is a 13th-century illuminated bestiary. The animal pictures are very beautiful but also very funny, especially one of an owl with a disturbingly human face.

Owl mobbed by smaller birds, Harley 4751, f.47 – Amy’s favourite collection item

Any book recommendations for our readers?

Alexa: I’m a fan of historical fiction, particularly Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth series.

Amy: My favourite book is also a work of historical fiction, The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, set in a medieval library.

Zoë: I’m currently reading The Mother of All Jobs: How to Have Children and a Career and Stay Sane(ish) by Christine Armstrong. It’s about women in the workplace and is so relevant with what’s happening with home-schooling due to Covid.

Go behind the scenes with our conservators via our Collection Care blog

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