Oysters of the Occult:Riding the 63 into the Twilight Zone.

Last night's London Fortean Society talk, Fortean Travels in London, was not just one of the LFS's best ever events. It was also, so far, the most personally relevant to me. Chris Roberts, author of Bus Travels in South London, was there to tell a story of headless commuters, feral albino swine, and the Peckham Terminator and if that wasn't promising (or local) enough for me he'd decided to set it in the form of a journey.

A journey on the 63 bus. My bus! Or, at least, the bus I take the most often. The bus that takes me into 'town'. The bus whose route starts a few hundred yards from my flat in Honor Oak Park and finishes about an hour, or seven and a half miles, later outside King's Cross station. The only shame about the evening is that there were fewer people in attendance than you'll usually find on that very bus.

With King's Cross being a hub for trains, tubes, buses, and the canals, Chris had prepared a highly apt destination but as with so much else this was much more about the journey than the end point. A journey that begins outside Camberwell Old Cemetery by the pub now called Watson's General Telegraph but which Chris referred to by its old name The Forest Hill Tavern.

Something I put him right on during a very pleasant exchange later. Chris began by reciting a Lord's Prayer (The Bus Driver's Prayer) of South London in which various London place names had been amusingly inserted into the verse. Most noticeably, to anyone like me who used to make a regular habit of crashing out on the bus, the line "lead us not into Penge station".

It was far from Chris's only digression on a route that proved to be as circuitous as it was enjoyable. Near Camberwell Old Cemetery and Watson's General Telegraph stands One Tree Hill. I buried an ex-girlfriend's pet rat, Chester, there once and, some years later, I slept on a bench there after I'd lost my keys. I awoke to a fantastic view of the London skyline (and a terrible hangover, of course). A skyline much changed since the times Dick Turpin used the vantage point to survey the city from above while identifying his next victim.

One Tree Hill boasts considerably more than one tree but the one it's named after is the one that Elizabeth I is believed to have taken repast under. It's surrounded by an iron railing now and it's a sight I pass by on a regular, almost daily, basis. It's so wild in there it's a handy spot if you're caught short on the walk home.

It's not something I feel guilty about. Despite its royal associations, One Tree Hill has a rebellious spirit at heart. It may be the only place in London that was once home to an anti-golf riot. It wasn't that the citizens of SE23 took a particular dislike to Tony Jacklin or Nick Faldo so much as they weren't happy with plans to convert the forested area into a golf course. Quite rightly so.

Sadly, I can't claim to have ever had a romantic experience on One Tree Hill but many years ago a courting couple were atop the hill spooning when suddenly their passions were extinguished by the sight of a small girl floating in mid air. Chris suggested it was a case of ghostus interruptus.

The 63 rolls down the hill from the cemetery, hill, and pub to the edge of Peckham Rye (where William Blake claims to have seen "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars"), passing what Chris referred to as "the mighty Peck" (in truth, barely a brook and in most places completely covered) and the remains of the Peckham lido. Now just a barely discernible fountain but rumours abound of it reopening and I live in hope.

We soon arrive at the Nigel Road bus stop. The sight of an incident that must have been unpleasant at the time but soon become a viral Internet phenomenon. The Peckham Terminator didn't look much like Arnold Schwarzenegger. In fact he was a fairly weedy looking, slightly camp, young white guy who, some years ago, had a complete meltdown on the bus at the Nigel Road stop.

Like almost everything else that ever happens, it was filmed on a mobile phone. The young man first offered to fight every single other person on the bus in a tirade of expletives and gesticulating. When nobody took him up on his kind offer he redoubled his efforts. When these proved, also, unsuccessful he ended the whole incident with the somewhat dramatic final coda of exiting the bus by walking straight through the closed glass doors of the bus and stomping off down the road. Much to the amusement of observers.

It's all on YouTube should you wish to see it. There's even a grime remix of events! I once saw a man casually punch another man in the face only a few hundred yards away from the incident but, mostly, the 63 bus journey continues in peace. Often stopping to change drivers before passing the architecturally pleasing Peckham Library and carrying on just to the east of the old Surrey Canal.

The Canal is no more and has been turned into a foot and bike path but the bridges are still there and you can still see the marks of the ropes ingrained into the brickwork. Just before the bus reaches the edge of Burgess Park you cross the former canal and there lies, at least in urban legend, the former home of the Peckham Toy Maker.

It is believed that after the destruction of the Toy Maker's house that local children would still gather to play in the ruins but, one day, they found something in the chimney. It was clearly something horrific (or perhaps unmemorable) as Chris neglected to tell us what it actually was they found. Which certainly qualifies the story as a mystery but, unlike many other tales Chris told - often under the heading 'flash fiction' - the story of the Peckham Toy Maker did not send a chill down my back.

At the corner of Burgess Park, the 63 turns left down Old Kent Road and if you take a quick glance to your right you'll see the Old Kent Road Fire Station. Before it was a fire station it was a pub and it is believed, by some, that David Bowie recorded there in the seventies.

The East Street (where Charlie Chaplin was born) bus shelter has worked its way into South London legend by dint of a very peculiar event that took place between five and ten years ago. Atop the shelter, and visible only to bus passenger's eyes, there could be found several VHS copies of the film Hellraiser. The number fluctuated over a four/five year period but I can attest, as a regular 63 user, that, during that period, there was never less than one copy and sometimes as many as seven or eight.

Why? We don't know. They've gone now though. The 63 crosses the former route of the Neckinger river (now completely covered) and soon reaches Elephant & Castle. The Northern line between Bank and Elephant & Castle (which, along with the 63 and a fair bit of walking, was my route home from Whitechapel) is the first part of the tube system to go electric.

In fact, because of this, it's the first part of tube to be called 'the tube'. There are lots of ghost stories down in this part of the tube (buses, for the most part, seem to host less ghosts than tubes or trains) and many of them take place in the part known as the Kennington loop where trains on the two different branches of the Northern Line turn round.

One tells of a construction worker carrying out his business underground and bantering with his colleages about the slim chances of Charlton Athletic winning the league. On resurfacing to ground level he found all his real colleagues already there. The people he'd been laughing and joking with just moments earlier were ghosts of those killed underground years before.

Away from the 63 route, there's a tale of a ghost bus. The number 7 passes through Cambridge Gardens in Notting Hill but so does the ghost of a number 7 bus. Sightings have been so vivid that one person has even died swerving to avoid the spectral omnibus.

Along Blackfriars Road, past blue plaques to Marys Shelley and Wollstonecraft, the 63 crosses the Thames on Blackfriars Bridge. Blackfriars Bridge marks the spot where, primarily due to it being where the Fleet used to flow into the Thames, the river changed from freshwater to saltwater. To mark this the bridge is festooned with symbolic sea animals on its eastern side and land animals on its western flank.

A few bridges down river (Blackfriars Rail Bridge, Millennium Footbridge) between Southwark Bridge and the Cannon Street railway bridge is the site where, on 20th August 1989, the Marchioness pleasure cruiser, which was hosting a birthday party, collided twice with the dredger Bowbelle just before 2am in the morning resulting in fifty-two deaths.

There is an old maritime belief that seagulls represent the spirits of the departed and, following the Marchioness disaster, this passed into hack folklore when Fleet Street journalists, enjoying a fag break, observed that whenever they looked out to the river and counted (or, more realistically, tried to count) the seagulls it always seemed there were exactly fifty-two in the space where the disaster had taken place.

Centuries earlier, Edward I of England (reign:1272-1307), commonly known as Edward Longshanks or the Hammer of the Scots, didn't just take against those from north of the border. He was a raging anti-semite too and he planned to rid London of Jews by putting them on a boat near this point and deporting them all to Spain. Which, at the time, had a reputation for admirable religious tolerance.

This was, of course, before the Spanish Inquisition which, you won't need reminding, nobody expected!  London, while having many virtues, has long been home to murder, violence, and cruelty and that's continued through the ages with riots, knife crime, acid attacks, and, within the last twenty years, voodoo sacrifice!

Voodoo sacrifice! In London. In the twenty-first century! Near Blackfriars Bridge, on 21st September 2001, an infant torso was found with his arms, legs, and heads all ritually removed. He was given the name 'Adam' and it is believed he was trafficked from Nigeria expressly so that these body parts could be removed and used for witchcraft. In the years that followed other artefacts used in voodoo rituals have been found along this stretch of river but, as yet, no other bodies.

Hopefully it'll remain that way. I'm far more comfortable with patently untrue, yet still grisly, stories than I am with genuine child murder and mutilation so it was good to get over the bridge (via a quick story about Roberto Calvi which you can read more about here) and reach Blackfriars station where legend tells of a man, slightly sozzled following after work drinks with his colleagues, boarding the 2245 Orpington bound train.

On reaching his stop, Herne Hill, the man observed a ghost hand banging on the outside window of the train. Back in the land of the credible the Unilever Building (we're now north of the river) stands on the former site of Henry VIII's Bridewell Palace where Mr VIII met with officials of the Roman Catholic church to inform them he was going solo. It is, essentially, where the Church of England, was born.

A precursor to Brexit it's been suggested? Hmmm! Not sure about that. Soon the 63 passes beneath Holborn Viaduct and it's near here that urban legend says live a colony of subterranean pigs who somehow floated down the underground route of the Fleet river from Hampstead. It's an urban legend that has variations elsewhere. New York has its alligators and Florida has, you may have heard of this lot, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

It's not just porkers that are rumoured to be living underneath us. There's also a story about a tribe of subterranean troglodytes who have lived down there for so long that their language has devolved to the point that the only words they can say are, and this sounds very plausible, "MIND THE GAP".

Votive offerings of spoons were, fairly recently, found attached to Holborn Viaduct and these were to mark the deaths of heroin addicts. Further north, it is said that Faringdon station is haunted by the ghost of Anne Naylor. A poor girl from the workhouse who was taken into what was laughably called care and beaten and abused by the couple who took her in. Eventually they killed her and disposed of her body by chopping it up and forcing it down into the sewers.

Where she waits restlessly until this very day. Apparently! The no longer in use station for the British Museum, not so far away, is said to be haunted by the ghost of an Egyptian mummy from the museum.

Finally the 63 bus, and us - its passengers, reach our destination. King's Cross. Where we can all gather on the concourse to raise a glass to Clive James, Gary Rhodes, and Jonathan Miller (the news of all three's passing had come through earlier in the day) and be regaled with further tales of extraordinary and fantastical events on Transport for(tean?) London. As well as a poorly received (but not by me) joke about So Solid Crew.

Chris Roberts told us about 'the ruined bride' whose spouse calamitously stuck his head out of a train window on his honeymoon only to lose it. The tragedy becoming a mystery due to the account of the story claiming the bride was left holding his head, not his body. We learnt about the ghost locomotives that have been spotted on the decommissioned line (now a linear path) between Finsbury Park and Highgate, the haunted barges on the Hertfordshire canal, The Aldgate Electric Angel, and the Crossbones graveyard in Southwark.

We digressed into stories of the Necropolis railroad between Waterloo and Brookwood which took corpses to the enormous burial site in the Surrey town (there are nearly one hundred times as many dead bodies in Brookwood as there are living ones). The train even had a bar which jokingly boasted "spirits served here".

Chris told us how work on Crossrail has created a heated debate about Boudicca's massacre of the Romans in the Walbrook. During Crossrail excavation work, skulls were unearthed in the river. Some believe they are victims of the massacre, others hold the belief that they're simply people who were buried nearby. As an aside, Chris topically mentioned that had Uber not lost their license to operate in London earlier this week there would soon, no doubt, be plenty of Uber related ghost stories.

Whilst giving honourable mentions to Charles Dickens and M. R. James, Chris told us the story of The Black Nun of Bank who still begs for the pardon of her husband who was hanged for embezzlement and that of Rebecca Griffiths of Liverpool Street. Rebecca, a former inmate of Bedlam, was buried without the penny she held in her hand throughout her life. She waits now in the afterlife with her hand outstretched and open in eternal hope of the return of her one belonging.

It was a touching note to end a fantastic speech, delivered by a fantastic and passionately interested, speaker. In Chris Roberts I saw a kindred spirit. A man with a profound love for London, its history, and its mysteries. The history of London is so rich, so varied, so layered, and so disputed that I could study it until the day I die and never get bored. I can only give thanks to Chris Roberts and, as so often, the London Fortean Society for an evening that's far more fun than sniffing somebody's armpit on the Jubilee Line in the rush hour. Mind the gap!

The Enclosure of Primal Elements:Antony Gormley @ the Royal Academy.

"How do you make the timelessness of inert, silent objects count for something? How to use the, in a way, dumbness of sculpture in a way that acts on us as living things" - Antony Gormley.

The Royal Academy's current Antony Gormley exhibition is as grand as it is popular - and it's very popular indeed. Most weekend ticket slots were sold out well in advance. Yet it was never uncomfortably packed and there was plenty of space to move around, spend time with the works,. and to take photos. Even selfies. Which, with Gormley's work, seems almost de rigueur.

Lost Horizon I (2008)

I didn't go as far as the somewhat inebriated couple who were lying down beneath sculptures and being gently rebuked by security for posing while hugging them but I did break my usual protocol to include a couple of photographs of mine and my art companion Valia's fizzogs.

This chance to 'get involved' is, I think, one of things that has made Gormley such a popular artist for the times we live in. For the age of Instagram. But I don't think that's the only thing people like about him. Hopefully we're not quite that self-obsessed. Not yet anyway. I think people like the scale and the humanity of his work as much as they do the spectacle that surrounds it and though, to my mind, his sculptures work better in situ (think of Gateshead's Angel of the North or the one hundred figures of Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool) it must be said the curators at the RA have done a very good job of turning an exhibition into an experience.

Or even, at a push, an event! There's much more to see (and much more to do) than there is to read which makes the show quite different to many I'd seen at the Royal Academy over the years. It seems to me that's just how Gormley wants it. On entering the very first room a sign informs us that "the visitor is centre stage" and calls for "our physical and imaginative participation". Which is defeated slightly by the security instruction to not to touch, or hug, the works.

Gormley believes that art only really comes to life when an audience interacts with it. It seems he's of the school that believes a tree falling in a forest doesn't make a sound unless there's somebody there to hear it. To aid us in being with the art, in the hear and now, this is the only sign you'll encounter (though there is a booklet available) as you pass through twelve of the thirteen rooms (one is impassable, more of that later) that make up the exhibition.

Slabworks (2019)

Slabworks (2019)

The idea, quite clearly, is to experience the art, to be with the art. Not to pontificate or read about the art and, I must admit, probably not to write a medium sized length blog about it! 

At least I did that afterwards. At the time I did my very best to be present with the art. To observe it, to smile at it, to laugh with it, and, even, when necessary (thankfully rarely), to pooh-pooh it. The first couple of rooms 'Slabworks' and 'Early Works' acted as an hors d'ouevre to the heartier fare that Gormley would be serving up once our appetites had been whetted but they also demonstrated how Gormley has always been interested in the human body. Not necessarily as a living, breathing organism or for its beauty, sexuality, fallibility, and, ultimately, its disposable nature but as, what the artist terms, a "vessel for feeling".

He's been criticised in the past for basing his human sculptures on his own body but in response to that he's been very clear that he's doing that not because he's different but because he is very average. I say different not special because we're all special. Besides, all artists need to work with what they have at hand and if we don't even have free reign over our own bodies then what do we have?

Slabworks (2019)

Slabworks (2019)

Gormley's fourteen Slabworks sculptures don't necessarily look like people (I've even posed a real person next to one so you can see both the difference and the similarities in scale) but it doesn't take long to see that they are, in some way, deconstructed human figures. Created with extreme precision from hard edged steel slabs and laid out in poses ranging from the upright to the extremely relaxed, the Slabworks are representation simplified to levels just shy of crude.

These ur-people retain a sense of dignity and humanity despite being incapable of genuine emotion. Sometimes we dwarf them, sometimes they dwarf us. They speak to the human desire to see a meaning, and a reason, in everything and yet they are, by their very nature, quite literally as cold as polished steel. 

The Slabworks were all made this year but the room containing 'Early Works' lived up to its name (for the most part - Mother's Pride V was dated 2019) by taking us back, in some instances, over four decades to Gormley's time as a post-graduate at Slade School of Fine Art at London's UCL. They show a quirkier side to the artist. 

Not least in his use of apples and bread as materials to create with. They demonstrate Gormley's sense of humour and the small debt he owes (and acknowledges) to the Italian Arte Povera movement. Land Sea and Air I makes me think of hot cross buns, Mother's Pride V made me chortle with its falling (or somersaulting) figure cut from a grid of unappetising looking white sliced bread, and One Apple from 1982 made use of fifty-three lead cases to show the growth of an apple from petal fall to maturity.

Each contains the dried remains of the fresh apple which was moulded to make the form for its case. Exercise in Blood and Earth 2019, despite its title, dates back to 1979 and made me realise (ok, Valia pointed it out) just how rarely Gormley utilises colour in his work. The blood reds of this 'drawing' and others, and the actual blood that crops up later in the show, being the exceptions that prove the rule.

Land Sea and Air I (1977-79)

Blanket Drawing V (1983)

Mother's Pride V (2019)

One Apple (1982)

Exercise Between Blood and Earth 2019 (1979-81)

I wondered why an artist so alive to the possibilities of feeling and experience should choose to use such a monochrome or, often, grey palette. I wondered but I got no answers and I was soon distracted by the enormity of Clearing VII. I even wondered how I'd negotiate the work to get to the next room. Which was obviously a very major reason for the work's size and inclusion in the RA show.

Gormley calls it a "drawing in space" and it's made from roughly eight kilometres of square section aluminium tube. It expands into all four walls, ceiling, and floor and it'd be close to impossible to pass through the room without touching at least some of it. The chin stroking verdict is that it challenges the notion of what is and isn't sculpture and asks questions about spatial boundaries and how they affect our understanding of things but the more fun task is passing through without getting tangled up in it. You're not allowed to go right through the middle so you have to go round.

Clearing VII (2019)

Clearing VII (2019)

Gormley's self-proclaimed 'bundle of nothing' was fun but I've had more difficulty beating down thorns and bracken during my TADS walks than I had clearing Clearing VII. The room that abuts this funfair diversion holds a human size man who looks as if he's been constructed of high end Jenga. Subject II (for that was the dude's name) looked a bit lonely compared to many of Gormley's sculptures as he had a room all to himself.

Without the company of his chums it seemed as if he came under more intense scrutiny than others and, somehow, that gave him something that came close to expression. Which is not something you could say for, in terms of allocation of space at least, the show's central exhibit - Matrix III!

Subject II (2019)

Subject II (2019)

Matrix III (2019)

Matrix III (2019)

As much as I enjoyed getting up close and personal with Subject II, I also could not help but marvel at Matrix III's sheer size. This is when being a successful and rich artist really helps. It seems almost inconceivable that an up and coming artist would be given the space, the funds, or the wherewithal to create such a vast piece. That's how life is. We all know that. Those who have been given, or indeed earned, the huge privilege to occupy these cavernous saloons should both be thankful of the opportunity and grasp it with both hands.

To be fair to Gormley, it seems he's done both. Matrix III is a "vast cloud" made of 98% recycled steel mesh (normally used to reinforce concrete walls, you'll have seen it on the news - exposed in war zones) that hangs from the RA's ceiling. Twenty-one cages intersect to create an often opaque structure that has at its heart a void that Gormley, pretentiously, has called "the space of dreaming".

It's the equivalent to an average size bedroom in an average sized newly built European house (which Gormley, almost certainly, does not live in). Gormley has said of the work that it represents "the ghost of the environment we've all chosen to accept as our primary habitat" which seems to overlook the fact that most of us haven't necessarily chosen our exact habitat but had it chosen for us by financial and political circumstances.

Matrix III (2019)

Matrix III (2019)

Matrix III (2019)

Gormley doesn't come across as a political animal so I'll cut him some slack on that (like, he's reading this) but if I was making a political metaphor about Matrix III, I'd probably suggest that the network of fine wires that hold the entire thing up will surely, one day, come under so much stress from the weight of the structure that the whole thing will come crashing down on our heads.

At the exact opposite end of the scale to Matrix III is Co-ordinate VI. Co-ordinate VI consists of, quite simply, three highly tensioned steel bars that pass through several rooms of the exhibition doing very little apart from offering the viewer a chance of getting their head gently sliced off and ending up like one of those anaemic pieces of Mother's Pride bread.

Co-ordinate VI (2019)

Headway (1989)

Despite all the talk of making physical "the abstract notion of the horizontal" and "perceptual conundrums" it is, at best, a pleasantly amusing diversion. A more cynical viewer than I may even call it a waste of space and it seems even Gormley needs to show, after Co-ordinate VI, that he can both actually draw and properly fill his rooms from hereon in. 

Gormley claims he draws everyday, that he views it as "meditative" and a "creative wellspring", and works like Headway show he's not short of talent when it comes to this more traditional form of creation. These aren't preparatory sketches for his larger sculptural works but pieces in their own right. But, for the most part, RA visitors were passing through this room at a fairly rapid clip because they could see that the next room contained one of Gormley's greatest hits. The clearly huggable Lost Horizon I. 

Lost Horizon I (2008)

Lost Horizon I (2008)

Lost Horizon I (2008)

Lost Horizon I is one of the Gormley works that (nearly) everybody knows and there are iron casts of Gormley's body protruding from the floor, the walls, and, somehow, the ceiling everywhere you look. In an attempt to deny us the distant horizontal line we use to orientate ourselves, Gormley has attempted to, ever so gently, discombobulate us and to look at ourselves, our bodies and how they occupy space, as if we were no longer contained by them.

The fact we do this without even really thinking about it, while also taking in ideas about gravity and space, shows that Gormley works best when the concepts that underpin his work are lightly applied. The sheer amount of figures, and the iron casts they're made up of, may be pretty heavy but the concept is anything but. 

Lost Horizon I (2008)

Body (1991/93)

Fruit (1991/93)

It's a fun room and, just a guess, I reckon it's the one that crops up most on Instagram. To the side of it two giant iron sculptures hang from the roof like a pair of distended testicles or an executive stress toy for giants. Body and Fruit actually belong to Gormley's 'Expansion Works' series, works made from poses the artist has struck mid-run, jumping, or falling before then "painstakingly" moulding them in plaster.

Body and Fruit saw Gormley adopt a foetal position to decide the shape of the work and though there are ideas to be had by pondering the rust on the sculpture's surface, the illusion of a gravitational pull, or even their quietly undulating nature, it was almost too tempting not to push them into each other or swing around on them.

It'd be great to see what Antony Gormley could do with a children's playground! Certainly a series of concrete works from the early nineties had the feel of the kind of playground I'd play in throughout my youth, long before the notion of 'soft play' had caught on. I recall swings, slides, roundabouts, and, if you were very lucky, seesaws and witches hats set against harsh concrete surfaces scattered in broken glass and fag butts.

Porno mags were normally hidden in the bushes too - but I digress. Pieces like Press and Flesh each contain a void in the form of a body. Feet, hands, and heads have left their imprints but they are no longer here. They're memento mori for those that love brutalism, memories of people that once were here but now are not, and, perhaps because of that, the most affecting of all to me was Flesh that took the form of a cross as if to act as a placeholder in both an artistic and a more traditional sense. It could easily have appeared during my three part series of Magnificent Seven graveyard walks earlier this year.

Press (1993)

Flesh (1990)

As if leaving this life and entering into the next dimension the following room consisted entirely of Gormley's recent Cave. Sculpture, it's claimed - quite correctly, on an architectural scale. You can choose to pass through a darkened passageway or to walk round it. I went through it but Valia bottled it (either that or she was concerned that I'd use the cover of darkness to attempt to goose her).

What you can't see when you're in the Cave (well, you can't see much but bear with me) is that, from above, the "jostling cuboid structures" reveal themselves to be shaped like a vast human body crouched on its side. Gormley holds much faith in the idea that awareness of our bodies is heightened by darkness or closing our eyes and I don't necessarily disagree with them on that but you only take about four to five footsteps in complete darkness before you reach the exposed, and lit, central room of the cave so it's not as if we get much time to really meditate upon how our bodies exist in this space.

Cave (2019)

Cave (2019)

Cave (2019)

It's a great idea and it's a fun exhibit but it highlights another problem that occurs when Gormley's work is moved to a gallery. Outside, exposed to the elements, the experience of Cave would be more disarming, more frightening, more beautiful, and, most likely, more meaningful in a number of different ways.

The same could be said of 2019's Host. A wonderfully helpful guide explained to us that Gormley had instructed the room should only be lit by natural light and as it was roughly 5pm in November there was very little, none, of that. Therefore, during our visit Host was lit by the lights in another room of drawings next door.

Which was a pity because I liked the concept behind it and I'm sure I'd have appreciated it more if I'd arrived an hour earlier! Gormley calls it an "invasion of the inside by the outside" and it's made up of an expanse of seawater and clay. You'd need wellies on to pass through the room without getting wet socks but, as it is, you're merely allowed to look in and admire the basic, primal elements enclosed within, and juxtaposed against, the ornate 18c gallery.

Home and the Underworld (1989)

Point III (1989)

Home (1990)

The drawings in the room next to Host feature roads leading to nowhere and people staring out to space as well as a work made of Gormley's own blood (1990's Home is no match for Marc Quinn's Self from the following year when it comes to body shock and horror). Sat next to the chance to contemplate the very materials that make up our environment it seems that, as the show comes to the end, Gormley has begun to travel, for a change, outside of his, or our, body to look at the wider world.

It seems, like most of us, he's worried about what he's seeing. Environmental concerns are the greatest concerns the planet has at the moment but, as the handy booklet tells me, Host may be about climate change and environmental degradation but it may also represent the ideal conditions for new life to form. It may prove to be that the human body Gormley had made his life's work will no longer be a relevant vessel let alone a vessel for feeling as we move towards the future.

It may just be an empty vessel, as devoid of feeling as one of Antony Gormley's cast iron sculptures and, without humans to consider it, the death of all humanity could be as unlamented as that of a tree that falls in a forest and is heard by nobody. When you leave the gallery spaces and exit via the courtyard of the Royal Academy, Antony Gormley has one last surprise for you.

1999's Iron Baby, lying defensively yet exposed on the cold paving, is based on a model of Gormley's then six day old daughter. It's made of iron, the material you can find at the very core of our planet, and like our planet the logical thing to do would be to look after it. But, instead, we, of course, stop to look at it, take a photo, and move on. The Iron Baby is just a sculpture and if it was to be destroyed it'd be a pity. All the real babies and all the real bodies that are destroyed on a day to day basis in the pursuit of profit aren't sculptures and their deaths are all individual tragedies. In making one body, his own, somehow universal it seems that Antony Gormley is making us consider not just how we fit in our bodies or how our bodies react to the world around them but what they can take and what they can give to the world they exist within. Our bodies are the tools we use to either destroy, or repair, the planet we live in but our minds are the offices in which the executive decisions are taken as to which of these options we'll choose. We better choose soon and we better choose wisely.

Host (2019)

Iron Baby (1999)

Thanks to Valia for sorting the tickets, coffee in Waterstones beforehand, a quick debrief in a Soho pub afterwards, and, most of all, for accompanying me and thanks to Antony Gormley for making me think.