“It always starts with a body,” the world-weary, seen-it-all detective mutters, “then come the questions.”[1]
*
In his gospel story of the resurrection, John seems to go out of his way to tell his readers that Jesus appeared with a full physical body.[2] Jesus asks Mary Magdalen not to cling to him, after she finally recognises him outside the empty tomb (she initially mistakes him for the gardener). For Mary to want to cling on, Jesus had to be real, physically present; there had to be something to hold on to.
*
I am a creature of habit. A couple of times a year I fly for work from Pōneke | Wellington, Aotearoa | New Zealand’s capital city where I live at the bottom of the country’s North Island, to Ōtautahi | Christchurch, an east coast city halfway down the South Island. Whenever I travel to Christchurch, I visit Stay, a sculpture in two locations in the city by the English artist Antony Gormley (b. 1950). It’s one artwork in two locations. One sculpture depicts a male form standing midstream in the Ōtakaro | Avon, the city’s river, as if he’s purposely waded in and is looking for something on the riverbed; the other an identical figure holding an identical pose—upright, looking down—is lost in thought in an inner courtyard in the city’s Arts Centre. And when I say “I visit”, it’s more of a pilgrimage; I sit with, look, and—as the work’s name suggests—stay.
*
Antony Gormley’s sculpture has long fascinated me. I spend time with his work wherever I can in cities all over the world: London, Singapore, San Francisco, Sydney. Perhaps best known for his 1998 work The Angel of the North—a massive figure standing 20m/66ft tall with a 57m/200ft wingspan next to a motorway in the north of England—Gormley’s output almost entirely revolves around representations of the human body.
And not just any body.
His own.
Gormley’s fascination with the human body is rooted in a deep desire to understand his own. The majority of his sculptures are designed and cast in dimensions related to his body measurements.[3] Large sculptures are multiples of his height, small ones half or quarter of his size, and so on. His explorations of what constitutes body form have evolved over the years, just as his sculptural language of engagement with the world has similarly evolved. For Gormley, using his body is neither narcissistic nor egotistical, rather, in taking his physicality as the starting point for this engagement, he seems to suggest the body (his, mine, yours) is the measure of how we calibrate our surroundings.[4] As Gormley says:
I wanted to use the body as my primary vehicle, and not the body as appearance, and not the body as some kind of narrative protagonist in a story, but [the body] as a place, the place of being. And, in order to do so, I had to use my own existence, I had to use my own life, I had to use my own body as tool, material, and subject.[5]
In other words, in order that we might make sense of, and operate in the world, we have to be physically, bodily present in it; to intentionally use our bodies to understand who and where we are.
*
I was ten and, as part of preparations for an overseas family holiday, mum took my brother and me to get up-to-date with our vaccinations. One moment I was sitting up in the chair as the nurse put the needle in my upper arm. The next moment—as far as I knew—I came to on the surgery floor, my head pounding. I’d hit the floor with such a crack that the doctor had rushed in from his next-door office. (Oddly, I vividly remember dreaming about Moses and the Burning Bush as I was coming round.) The nurse offered me a mug of sugary tea.
*
This making sense of bodies—and our place—in the world is not an endeavour unique to Gormley. Since time immoral, humans have used bodies as units and means of creation, to act as representations and markers of (fleeting) life against, upon, and with the fundamental (and near-permanent) materiality of the world. See, for example, the red, stencilled hands in Cueva de las Manos in Argentina (close to 10,000 years old); the human figures of Gwion Gwion, Australia (likely 20,000 years old);
the extraordinary Löwenmensch figure (the lion-man, about 40,000 years old) discovered in the Hohlenstein-Stadel caves in Germany.
*
I have many favorite sculptures. I like Nic Fiddian-Green’s horse heads—there’s more than a hint of ‘Caves of Lascaux’ for me about his work, particularly his massive sculpture Still Water[6]
the proximity of one to another in Barbara Hepworth’s Contrapuntal Forms;[7]
there’s palpable relief and forgiveness in the embrace of Charlie Mackesy’s Return of the Prodigal;[8]
and, if I listen carefully, I hear the question being asked—“what is a body?”—in Henry Moore’s Bronze Form[9] in the Botanic Gardens in Pōneke | Wellington.
These sculptures offer differing approaches to the body: a replication of self, a close-up of the head, two figures in ambiguous near intimacy, two people embracing the body/not-body of Moore’s work. But I detect they—and similar—have something further in common. These sculptures—Gormley’s cast iron; bronze of Moore, Fiddian-Green and Mackesy; Hepworth’s blue limestone—are heavy. They have mass. Have weight and presence far greater than that of a human body (even if a human body were the size of their sculptures). The body’s presence is thus emphasized. In turn, by virtue of their unique locations and presence, these public ‘bodies’ invite us to ask public questions of how the body operates—and, by extension, personal ones too, of our bodies, ourselves—in relation to its surroundings. How does a body relate to the world, to the built environment, to water, to gardens; how do we—as bodies—relate to and operate in the created world; and, in Mackesy’s and Hepworth’s cases, to another body, to each other?
*
A revealing episode takes place a few weeks after Jesus’ resurrection.[10] It takes place by a different body—a body of water, the Sea of Galilee.
Despite being out all night fishing, the disciples haven’t caught anything. It’s now early morning, and they’re heading back in. Because of the pre-dawn half-light, the disciples can’t make out who it is on the shore yelling advice to them: “try the right side of the boat.” They do so. To their astonishment they catch so many fish they’re unable to haul in their nets. When they finally make it to shore, the disciples realize who it was giving them instructions.
“Come and have breakfast,” the physically risen Jesus invites his weary friends. He’s cooking for them, preparing food to nourish their bodies.
*
During his ministry, Jesus raised three people from the dead. They’re recorded in different Gospels, so it’s tricky to figure out the chronological order of raising, but the first was probably the widow’s son, recorded in Luke 7. The third was Jesus’ friend Lazarus—Mary and Martha’s brother—as told in John 11. But it’s the second I’m interested in: the story of Jesus raising Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5). The first thing Jesus says after he brings the girl back to life is to instruct her parents to give their daughter something to eat. Why? Apart from the vivifying quality of food—like why I was offered sugary tea after passing out—Jesus is saying something to reinforce the connection between eating and being physically present. Eating as proof of life?
*
I don’t think that’s all, though. At the end of Mark’s story, Jesus literally and metaphorically instructs the parents how not to let their daughter slip away again. The English poet Michael Symmons Roberts (b. 1963) captures this moment perfectly in the opening stanzas of his poem ‘Jairus’:
So, God takes your child by the hand
and pulls her from her deathbed.
He says: ‘Feed her, she is ravenous.’
You give her fruits with thick hides
—pomegranate, cantaloupe—
food with weight, to keep her here.[11]
Like Mary Magdalen with the resurrected Jesus at the tomb, there’s an instinct to tether Jairus’s daughter to earth. The sense of clinging to being. I detect something tender and human in Symmons Roberts’s poem, and something incredibly aware of the divine act of resurrection. And there are the weighty images of heavy food that resonate with the cast iron of Gormley’s sculptures: the stuff and evidence of physicality.
*
The same thing happens with the raising of Lazarus from the dead. One moment Lazarus is dead; next minute Jesus calls to him and Lazarus walks from the tomb. When in the opening verses of the following chapter we meet Lazarus again, Jesus has invited him to eat at the table. Jesus ensures Lazarus is fed. Twice the Gospels record resurrection followed immediately by feeding.
*
One more. Genesis 2 offers an expanded account of humankind’s creation. God forms man from the earth and breathes life into him. It’s a brand new, first, creation. Not resurrection, but ‘surrection’—from the Latin meaning an upward surge, a rising. This is, of course, the etymology of ‘resurrection’. I’m resurrecting here this archaic word. Surrected. After creating man, God’s first word spoken to his new creation (his ‘surrected’ one?), “You may surely eat.” Various translations offer variations on this theme: you can eat, you are free to eat. Although God goes on to say what can and can’t be eaten—the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—creation is immediately followed by the feeding of that creation. As with Jairus’s daughter and with Lazarus, there’s a sense that, whether surrected or resurrected, feeding is a signifier of physical presence. Proof of life. And to sustain this new life, to hold it here, it/we must be fed.
*
Further, the story of the Bible is one of food as provision—the story of the created body and its sustenance. God’s provision and food are emblematic of each other. We see it in the manna and quail of the desert. The Promised Land flows with milk and honey—and as if to cement its status as a land of abundance, in Numbers 13, spies bring back a bunch of grapes so large it takes two men to carry it. In Kings, Elijah is fed by ravens.
Fast forward to Jesus. His birth in some sense illustrates this graphically. Jesus was born and, Luke 2 tells us, was laid in a manger. Manger, or manger from French via Latin meaning ‘to eat’—is a place animals eat. Jesus, immediately after birth, lies as food in the place from which animals feed. God incarnate, in a body—symbolically, literally—as food to sustain our bodies.
*
Can sculptures eat?
*
Adam is surrected, he’s fed. Jairus’s daughter is resurrected, she’s fed. Lazarus is raised, he’s fed. And Jesus is resurrected. Following the established pattern from Genesis through the Gospels, one might expect proof of Jesus’s resurrection to be confirmed with Him also being fed. God incarnate eats. But, counterintuitively, rather than be fed, it’s Jesus doing the feeding. John shows Jesus barbecuing fish and grilling bread for his disciples.
Symmons Roberts tells this story, too. His poem ‘Food for Risen Bodies II’ is alert to the link between Jesus’ death and resurrection and the invitation in cooking and sharing breakfast. “On that final night, his meal was formal”, the poem begins. The final stanzas take us somewhere entirely—emotionally, environmentally, theologically—different:
Now on Tiberias’ shores he grills
a carp and catfish breakfast on a charcoal fire.
This is not hunger, this is resurrection:
he eats because he can, and wants to
taste the scales, the moist flakes of the sea,
to rub the salt into his wounds.[12]
This poem gets to the heart of the physicality of resurrection. And its deep legacy. Jesus feeds because, in death and his resurrection, through his body, he gives all who believe—his disciples here—opportunity to share, in all senses, in his resurrected life. Jesus’ pattern is consistent: he continues to feed—like Jairus’s daughter, like Lazarus, like Adam—all who are (re)surrected.
*
Gormley again: “the joy of sculpture is to make something that goes into the world … to make something that, once it goes into the world, it changes the world; it’s a way of interrogating the world, not reproducing it.”
*
(How) does my body fit into its habitat? (How) do I go into the world and change the world?
*
I live not in Pōneke | Wellington, not in Aotearoa | New Zealand, not even on this earth. No, like all of us, my primary dwelling place is in my own body. I live inside myself. Like the sculptures of Gormley, Mackesy, Moore, Hepworth, Fiddian-Green, et cetera, I am here, physically present, embodied (entombed, even?). I am made. Somehow. By some process. By some invisible hand. And like the work of Gormley and others, the body (mine, theirs) needs its habitat to make sense of itself. Yes, as I journey through this life in my body, I am attempting to make sense of myself (and the vessel I’m contained in) and the world in which I find myself. These are acts of faith.
And it’s some kind of faith to put something into the world, the fullness of which you’ll never live to see. The sculptor finishes his work and even though it leaves the foundry it’s unfinished. Only when installed does it begin coming into being. Only when physically embedded and embodied in this world does it stand any chance of completion. Completion can only happen in situ; only when it responds and is being responded to; when people (perhaps on work trips from the capital) sit by it, stay next to it, feed from it, feed it; as its environment—through light, rain, processes—engages with and feeds the materiality of the work. Gormley calls this ‘activating.’[13]
*
Am I, too, a creature living in anticipation of activation? My body is a human-sized space on this earth, a human-sized space in space. A body foreshadowing a resurrected body? Am I becoming a human(?)-sized space in eternity? As with these sculptures, so with becoming-me. Creation awaiting new creation.
*
Oh to have the faith of the artists of Cueva de las Manos, of Gwion Gwion, of Hohlenstein-Stadel…!
*
The body is simultaneously one and many things. Gormley explicitly describes his/the body as habitat, a unit of measure, a tool of calibration and navigation. I live in my body (which is why a vaccination-related out-of-body experience is so anomalous and memorable), called as I am to stay, to be here; it’s home and vehicle, life support system and vessel. But, as Jesus reminds us—cooking for risen bodies on Galilee’s shore—we must feed our physical selves with things of substance to keep us here. In an age of the virtual, of artificiality, of high consumption, I wonder the value of what I feed myself on, of what I use to cling to this place.
*
It’s more than that, though. Gormley’s work, the physicality of the post-resurrection Jesus, the insistence of feeding, the results of one body on/activating another, all offer a sense of our own relationship(s) with ourselves, as created beings within the fullness of creation.
Bodies are shared territory. We all have one; and as we all have our own, so bodies are individual territory, too. And we all have differing relationships with ours (and other people’s). Symmons Roberts writes: “the body feels like particularly interesting and contested ground at the moment, because as a culture we don’t know whether we want to worship or deny it, subdue it or preserve it forever.”[14]
*
It’s more than that again. Art, poetry, sculpture—all sense-making rooted in the concrete (in sculpture’s case, literally) of shared human experience—must certainly offer us something. And it must surely feed us something.
So here we return to John 21. After feeding his disciples on the beach, Jesus instructs them with words reminiscent of those he spoke to Jairus and his wife: “feed my lambs”. I spend time in Ōtautahi | Christchurch with Gormley’s Stay because it feeds me in tangible and intangible ways. I visit Moore’s Bronze Form and, although I lay my palms against it to feel its warmth, it sustains me in ways I can’t quite put my finger on. I return to Mackesy’s Prodigal to be nourished by something.
*
Where there are bodies, questions are being asked, sense is being (re-)made.
*
(Where) do I see His body in these bodies?
*
Sculpture reminds me I am so I can become. To inhabit—to truly embody—Jesus’ words, I feed so I can feed. Whom shall I feed? With what? How?
Ben Egerton is a poet and academic from Aotearoa | New Zealand, where he teaches in Te Whānau o Akopai | the Faculty of Education at Te Herenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington. Ben holds a PhD from the International Institute of Modern Letters at the same university. Ben is the author of two poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Seed Drill (Kelsay, 2023).
[1] Endeavour, Season 9 Episode 2, ‘Uniform’, ITV, UK, directed by Nirpal Bhogal, aired 5 March 2023
[2] John 20:1-18.
[3] Malin Hedlin Hayden, ‘The Body: An Illusion’, from Statenskonstrad Catalogue 36, The National Public Art Council, Stockholm, Sweden 2007. https://www.antonygormley.com/resources/texts/the-body-an-illusion
[4] Thalia Allington-Wood, ‘Somatic Terrain: Topographies of Self and Space’, from In Formation, White Cube, London, UK, 2019. https://www.antonygormley.com/resources/texts/antony-gormley-in-formation
[5] Antony Gormley interviewed by John Wilson on the BBC radio show This Cultural Life, 25 April 2024. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001yj9v
[6] https://www.nicfiddiangreen.com/still-water-marble-arch/
[7] https://barbarahepworth.org.uk/sculptures/1951/contrapuntal-forms/
[8] https://www.charliemackesy.com/sculptures
[9] https://www.sculpture.org.nz/thesculptureshtml/bronze-form
[10] John 21:1-14.
[11] Michael Symmons Roberts, ‘Jairus’, Corpus (Jonathan Cape, 2004), 17.
[12] Michael Symmons Roberts, “Food for Risen Bodies II,” in Corpus (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 11.
[13] Antony Gormley, notes on ‘Run, 2016-22,’ https://www.antonygormley.com/works/sculpture/series/run
[14] Michael Symmons Roberts, “Poetry in a Post-Secular Age,” Poetry Review 94, no. 4 (2008): 72.