The Antony Gormley Project

DOUBT IS INSTALLED IN NICHE 338

On 26 August 2021, a new work by Antony Gormley entitled DOUBT (2020) was installed on the West Front of Wells Cathedral in Somerset. The work is on loan to Wells for a period of 18 months. 

Antony Gormley says: “I am very aware of the paradox of placing an object called DOUBT on the facade of a building devoted to belief, but it seems to me that doubting, interrogating, questioning, are all part of belief. For me doubt can be a positive force and the imaginative engine of future possibility.

I am interested in conversations in and about time, and in art as a continuum that brings history to now, and vice versa. I have chosen this niche on the West Front of Wells Cathedral for its exposed position and visibility: the book at the end of the bookshelf. The layered facade plays a wonderful game with its serial structuring of absence and presence, of the named and nameless. Many of the features have been erased by time and weather, exposing the stone’s material identity. The seriality of the niches, the quality and condition of the sandstone, and the gothic style of the front, are all complimentary qualities against which the geometric form, material, and industrial manufacturing methods of DOUBT are registered.

Most of the figures on the west facade stand facing the world in an open attitude of confidence, proudly displaying their attributes – regal, military, and divine. In contrast, I have used the orthogonal geometry of our modern habitat to evoke the body as a place. DOUBT is literally on edge and teeters uneasily out of its niche, one foot perilously off the ledge and one shoulder jutting forward. This cast iron body has collapsed into itself, compressing torso to pelvis; energy is drawn inwards but the head juts out enquiringly into space at large.

Whilst installing a work in Devon in 1993, I stood for a moment high on the trunk of a 10-metre dead oak tree in order to understand the feeling of a living Nelson on his column in Trafalgar Square. In a similar way, I see DOUBT as an attempt to invoke this feeling of being isolated and exposed on the corner of a Gothic masterpiece.”