The Trajectory Field series, initiated in 2002, evolved from Gormley’s earlier Quantum Field and Domain series, which investigated the ‘de-materialised’ body and the relation of parts to the whole. In these works, the bodily presence is evoked as a zone of energy, nerve and synapse rather than an anatomical structure of bone and muscle. In Trajectory Field I, steel rods are configured as independent elements, passing through and beyond the body zone, and intersecting to form an autonomous body structure, suspended in space.

Eckhard Schneider describes the Trajectory Field works as “somewhere between explosion and implosion, with the individual material fragments moving as if along prescribed tracks, lines of force, around a core of energy no longer delimitable […] Since Gormley no longer uses the method of analysis and synthesis of form and space in the rigid dialectic confrontation of antithetic appearance, the entire space is permeated by a precise moment in which immobility and motion, construction and deconstruction, inhalation and exhalation, are suspended quite naturally in complete stillness.”

(Eckhard Schneider, ‘Mass and Empathy’, Antony Gormley: Standing Matter, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Paris/ Salzburg, 2003, p.18)