The Angel of the North: A Monument of Memory and Meaning

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A Landmark in the North

Perched on a hill overlooking the A1 and A167 roads near Gateshead, in the North of England, stands Antony Gormley’s monumental sculpture The Angel of the North. Completed in 1998, this iconic UK landmark has become a beloved presence in the North East of England. Measuring 20 meters tall with an impressive wingspan of 54 meters, The Angel is visible for miles, symbolizing the evolution of the area from an industrial past to a hopeful future. So much more than just public art in North East England, The Angel has embedded itself into the cultural and emotional fabric of the region, evoking personal and collective narratives that shift and change over time.

The Angel as a Mirror of My Own Journey

Initially not welcomed by the local people of the North, The Angel’s transformation from a contested and criticized object to an iconic Gateshead landmark not only taught me about art’s ability to shift perception but also seemed to mirror my own journey of returning to the UK and coming to terms with my connection and disconnection to the place of my birth and my maternal bloodline.

Gormley’s use of the body as a site and location of experience resonates strongly with my own interest in investigating the body in sculpture as a means of understanding contemporary British sculpture and how it expresses the experience of embodiment, our interconnectedness with each other, and the spaces we inhabit.

The Duality of Home

My relationship with The Angel has been defined by my experience of having two places that exert a great pull on me—two places that qualify in different ways as “home.” This bittersweet legacy of existing in a state of “two-man’s land” was gifted to me by my mother and is one that I have regrettably passed to my own daughters by continuing the cycle of multiple relocations between the two lands in question. It tells many tales of trans-Atlantic love affairs, a difficult family history, and my long struggle to feel accepted in the place that I come from.

Returning to a Place That Didn’t Feel Like Home

The North of England has considerably less sun, money, and optimism than the more affluent Southern parts of the UK. It is not as forward-thinking or cosmopolitan as London, which for many people defines their impression of England, and new ideas and foreign people are still often met with suspicion in the North. My mother, who at the time had two mixed-race children, decided to join the wave of immigrants to Canada in the late 1960s in search of a more tolerant culture. She found it in Toronto, but upon her subsequent divorce and when she received news of her father’s impending death, she returned to the North East city of Newcastle, where I was born.

We returned to Canada a year or so later and stayed for another ten years, only to return once more to the North East of England during my eleventh summer. It was not a happy move. I was treated with much suspicion by the people I found myself surrounded by in the small, depressed mining village we initially moved to. A deep-seated mistrust of “Americans” still ran through much of the small-town mindset of Britain at the time, and it seemed I was judged and labeled an “outsider” before I could even attempt to plead my Canadian credentials.

I have read that this may be attributed to the living memory of the American GIs stationed in Britain during WWII, whose better pay packets, cigarettes, and exciting music proved irresistible to many of the young female population at the time—leaving behind a mistrust of anyone suspected of being a “Yank,” even by association.

This period in my family’s transition also coincided with the famously brutal austerity measures of the Thatcher years that coined the term The North/South Divide. All around the North, families that had long relied on heavy industry for employment scrabbled to find scapegoats for the loss of the pits, shipbuilders, and related trades.

These were not happy times for the region or for my family. My mother had hoped that the move to her homeland might have a positive effect on my father’s alcoholism and mental health. It did not, and within months of arriving, my mother was diagnosed with the crippling MS that eventually left her wheelchair-bound.

Relationships broke down completely, and at fifteen, I was made a ward of the state. As soon as I was able to apply for my own passport, I began efforts to return to the sunny Canada of my childhood. By eighteen, I had emigrated and embarked on a much happier time in my life, pushing aside the haunting ache of missed loved ones, relationships left hanging, stories unfinished.

The Angel at the Threshold of Change

A decade later, in the late ’90s, upon my own divorce and on learning of my own father’s grave illness, I packed my suitcase and returned—like my mother before me—to the North East of England with my young daughter.

It would be a gross understatement to say that things did not go well. Within days of arriving, the dark family history that had originally forced me out at fifteen resurfaced, leaving me unable to stay with family as planned. I had no money left to return to Canada and was suddenly faced with the reality of homelessness. In desperation, I approached Newcastle City Council for emergency housing.

Their long waiting lists meant they were unable to help me, but they suggested I could travel to the nearby city of Gateshead, just a few miles south of Newcastle’s city limits. Fully expecting to be turned away again, I was deeply grateful when I was instead driven, with my daughter, to a small town just within Gateshead’s jurisdiction, south on the A1—just past The Angel of the North. The drive to the women’s shelter that day was my first real-life viewing of Antony Gormley’s impact on public art, and despite the stress of my situation, I was quietly delighted to finally see the towering object of so much recent controversy with my own eyes.

A Monument That Became a Marker of My Own Story

My relationship with my family continued to be difficult, and the years that followed were harder than most, but I found work and set about building a new life in the small town just down the road from The Angel of the North.

As the years progressed, The Angel became a landmark of profound symbolism to me: I passed it each time I drove north toward Newcastle, the city of my birth, a place that held so much negative association for me. Six times during those years, I drove north to bury my people—Father, Grandparents, Aunt, Nephew, Brother. With each painful journey, Gormley’s monumental angel watched me anxiously travel past its gaze into my personal danger zone and then safely return to the life I built in the “safelands” south of The Angel.

I have finally returned once again to my beloved Canada. I would happily let my memories of so much of my time in the North East of England fade until I lose certainty over whether the memory is a manifestation of my dreams or my past.

The Angel now serves as a beacon for me, a real place and a solid object to orient myself by, but also as a place within my psyche: a symbol of transformation, hope, and connection. Somewhere in a part of my inner experience that doesn’t deal in objective realities, I hold an imagined memory: I see myself kneeling at the rusty foot of The Angel, this monumental being connecting earth, sky, and body. I have dirt jammed under my nails, and I have buried something—something painful that I must leave behind, here, where I will always know where to find it.