Antony Gormley ‘Angel of the North’

Okay, after the weekend diversion to accommodate Gauguin, I'm back with one last look at the work of sculptor Antony Gormley, and perhaps his most famous piece. Angel of the North is a steel structure employing 200 tonnes of steel, standing 20 metres tall, with wings measuring 54 metres across.
Installed in 1998 it stands on a hill on the southern edge of Low Fell, on the fringes of Gateshead,Tyne & Wear, in the north-east of England.
A panoramic hilltop site was chosen where the sculpture would be clearly seen by more than 90,000 drivers a day on the A1 road - more than one person every second - and by passengers on the East Coast main line from London to Edinburgh.
The site, a former colliery pithead baths synonymous with Gateshead mining history, was re-claimed as a green landscape during the early 1990s.
Gormley comments: "People are always asking, why an angel? The only response I can give is that no-one has ever seen one and we need to keep imagining them. The angel has three functions - firstly a historic one to remind us that below this site coal miners worked in the dark for two hundred years, secondly to grasp hold of the future, expressing our transition from the industrial to the information age, and lastly to be a focus for our hopes and fears - a sculpture is an evolving thing."
"The hilltop site is important and has the feeling of being a megalithic mound. When you think of the mining that was done underneath the site, there is a poetic resonance. Men worked beneath the surface in the dark. Now in the light, there is a celebration of this industry. The face will not have individual features. The effect of the piece is in the alertness, the awareness of space and the gesture of the wings - they are not flat, they're about 3.5 degrees forward and give a sense of embrace. The most important thing is that this is a collaborative venture. We are evolving a collective work from the firms of the North East and the best engineers in the world."