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• Food and Travel
• Issue 2

"One skyline, a seriously large amount of molten metal and a life-sized mould in the shape of, erm, myself."

So went Antony Gormley's shopping list after dreaming up the most brilliant idea to hit British sculpture since the Angel of the North. Unsurprisingly, that was a Gormley too.

In case you haven't noticed, London is currently home to an army of Gormley's solitary figures standing perilously close to the edges of buildings in central London. The exhibtion Event Horizon is made up of thirty-one casts of the artist's body similar to the figures permanently installed on Crosby Beach, Liverpool.

It's all part of the Blind Light exhibition currently on show at The Hayward which is, in a word, superb.

Having forgotten my binoculars - and with the eyesight of a mole - I gave up counting Gormleys from the balcony and headed off to see the main attraction, a cloud in a box, which is equally fabulous.

Enter the vapour tank (a large installation filled with thick ‘fog') and you lose, well, just about everything; your breath, your sense of direction, your mates.

Shuffling along like a zombie, with arms outstretched so as not to bang into the glass walls, I notice people whooshing past like blurred ghosts and, I think, if ever there were an art exhibit to make you feel sick, this is it.

Next up is Allotment II - and a chance to dry off. This work is essentially a room filled with 300 vertical concrete columns, the dimensions of which are based on real life inhabitants of Malmo, Sweden aged between 1 and 80.

Impressive and powerful, Gormley appeals to the viewer to interact with his frozen community as he draws you into a maze of non-humans lined up like soldiers. ‘The best bit?' I ask a passer by: "the 'holes' identifying each figures' gender". Quite.

Other faves include Mother's Pride - individual pieces of real bread stuck to a wall with a foetal shape neatly munched out of the middle - and a staggering selection of iron sculptures painstakingly constructed to create an array of human figures 'trapped' inside a maze of metal.

Words simply cannot do justice to Gormley's first major London exhibit. As he's been creating art since 1973, one can only lament that it has taken him so long to bring his creativity to the capital.

Blind Light runs at the Southbank Centre's Hayward Gallery until 19 August.

Images: Stephen White