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A full-size (195 cm tall) Gormley ‘body’ has been buried upside down at the Site, just in front of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, near the site’s main archway entrance, so that only the soles of the feet are showing through the paving.

Plant, as the work is titled, is the third piece of work to be given to the ̽��ֱ�� on long term loan from the collections of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, following Phillip King’s Span on the Sidgwick Site and the David Nash installation at Jesus College.

When Royal Academicians are elected they are asked to donate a Diploma work to the Academy. In recent years many of today's best sculptors have been elected meaning there has not been space to exhibit all the works in London.

̽��ֱ��new scheme, initiated by Kettle's Yard and the Royal Academy, will bring several RA Diploma works to Cambridge.

Speaking at an event to mark the inauguration of Plant last week, the sculptor said: “Sculpture is a form of physical thinking. It is a very conscious decision to remove the body from visual perception and replace it within the body of the earth. It’s reverse archaeology if you like, so I am particularly pleased that it has ended up here by the McDonald Institute as I studied just opposite in the Department of Archaeology as an undergraduate. I am very happy to be, disembodiedly, a continuing presence here.”

Former Director of the McDonald Institute Professor Colin Renfrew welcomed the installation: “Antony Gormley has enhanced our lives with his work and he has played a huge role in art and archaeology. His work is of compelling interest to an archaeologist confronting the material reality in existence. Plant is a work about vision, thought, knowledge and belief, prompting us to question what it means, whether it is really there and where did it come from.”

Antony Gormley studied archaeology, anthropology and the history of art at Trinity College, graduating in 1971. Over the last 25 years he has revitalised the human image in sculpture through a radical investigation of the body as a place of memory and transformation, using his own body as subject, tool and material. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1994 and the South Bank Prize for Visual Art in 1999 and was made an OBE in 1997. He is an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College and Jesus College Cambridge and has been a member of the Royal Academy since 2003.

̽��ֱ��McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research was founded in 1990 through a generous bequest of the late Dr D.M. McDonald. It exists to further research by Cambridge archaeologists and their collaborators into all aspects of the human past, across time and space, by supporting archaeological fieldwork and science, material culture studies and archaeological theory.

̽��ֱ��sculpture was installed recently with the assistance of the ̽��ֱ��’s Estate Management Department.
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