Home is where the art is

No trouble is too much for the Marquess of Cholmondeley to display to best effect Sir Antony Gormley's sculptures against the magnificent backdrop of Houghton Hall, even if it means cutting a hole in the floor, as Charlotte Mullins discovers

- Charlotte Mullins

THE 7th Marquess of Cholmondeley is standing in the central hall of his ancestral home, studying the flagged floor. Next to him is the towering form of Sir Antony Gormley, who is overseeing the installation of 100 life-size iron figures for Time Horizon at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, which opens to the public on April 21. They are discussing the placement of one of the sculptures close to where they stand. It will only be visible from the waist up and, to achieve this, they must cut a hole in the floor. ‘I am slightly apprehensive,’ says Lord Cholmondeley with a smile, but he seems more excited than worried. For he is well known for commissioning sculptures by the world’s leading artists—from Dame Rachel Whiteread to James Turrell—and, although Sir Antony’s is the largest work to date to be installed at Houghton Hall, the Marquess seems genuinely delighted by the challenge.

Sir Antony is known for his rigorous explor- ation of what it means to be a body in space. Since the early 1980s, he has been using his own form as ‘forensic evidence of a moment of lived human time’, casting it standing, sitting, crouching and sleeping. His body sprouted wings for The Angel of the North and endures the sea’s relentless ebb and flow in Another  Place on Liverpool’s Crosby Beach. It has been reduced to cuboids in his most recent public sculpture, True, for Alan Turing, in Cambridge, and transformed into near-absence in Quantum Cloud at London’s O2 Arena. Yet, although Sir Antony always uses his own body as the base for his work, his figures speak to us all about the human condition and our own place in the world.