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Tuesday July the 3rd.  High critical alert.  Deep in London. A dark figure emerges from a rooftop, seemingly hidden at first. Then another. Then another. There’s a clan.

A clan of sculptures made by Anthony Gormley using his body as the mould and positioned on rooftops, Waterloo Bridge and the pavement around the Southbank. They are part of his Blind Light exhibition at- and beyond- the Haywood. The outdoor sculptures, called Event Horizon, unsettle London and the hubbub of everyday life. In a good way. Wanderers smile and have their picture taken next to one of the iron figures. The rest of the exhibition, within the gallery walls, is great fun too, and, as in those person-with-sculpture souvenir photos, there is a dark side.

The main attraction is the Blind Light installation. It’s a glass box, the size of a smallish room, in which the twenty or so permitted visitors at a time experience engulfment in bright white steam. Lost and liberated, you are only able to see others if you converge within a couple of feet, or find your way to the glass wall and look out.

This headline attraction is not the only stunningly involving installation- I wanted to run, jump and climb amongst the works. Allotment II, for example, is a maze of three hundred concrete blocks, of varying width and height according to the individual measurements of real children and adults. It had me imagining an idyllic game of “stuck in the mud”, in and around the human tower blocks.



 
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