Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1998, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a sculptor. After a fairly conventional upbringing he was born in London

went to a Catholic public school and then to Cambridge he set off to travel the world.

In India he learned to focus on his own body through meditation

and once back in England began to develop the idea of body sculptures using his

own as the main model for his work. In 1994 he won the Turner Prize and earlier

this year unveiled a piece which will unquestionably attract lasting public

attention overlooking the motorway outside Gateshead it's called The Angel of the North,

65 feet high and with the wingspan of a jumbo jet.

It's a permanent example of its creator's belief that art should have a place outside galleries and museums.

He is Anthony Gormley.

Indeed I think Anthony your angel can claim to be the most viewed piece of sculpture in the world. I think somebody estimated

33 million a year passed by it.

That sounds incredible. I think we have to wait and see, but it's certainly more in one year

than I could ever hope to reach doing gallery shows.

And that's a statistic that delights you is it?

That's what you like.

I think it's terribly important to liberate art from the straight jacket of both the museum and the private gallery.

I think both of them are very, very specialized spaces that in some way are almost like hospitals in the kind of support that they give for what they show.

I think it's very important to see whether art can survive as part of the fabric of the built world and that's what the experiment of making

the angel was all about.

...