'What is an INSIDER? An INSIDER is to the body what memory is to consciousness: a kind of residue, something that is left behind. It is a core rather than a skeleton. It is a way of allowing things that are internal to the body - attitudes and emotions embedded in posture or hidden by gesture - to become revealed. They are equally alien and intimate.

The idea is that the pieces carry, in concentrated form, the trace of the body and its passage through life. This has a direct relationship to pain. I see these reduced forms as antennae for a particular kind of resilience that exists within all of us, that allows us to bear suffering but is itself created through painful experience. There is no judgment about this. Their bareness is not the nakedness that reveals the flesh; it is the result of having had the flesh taken away; a loss which is not sentimentalised, but accepted. The INSIDER tries to up the ante between being and nothingness.

INSIDERS started as an experimentation into a reduction or concentration of the body that was a reverse procedure from the expansion of the body that had concerned me in the late 80s and early 90s. It resulted initially from the reduction of the body that was necessary in the production of the ANGEL OF THE NORTH, where the body form had to be reduced all over by 12.5 mm in order for the 20 radial ribs to exist half within and half without the original body skin.

The INSIDER drawings compliment the sculpture series of the same name.'

Antony Gormley