I find myself on my hands and knees inside a giant cardboard body. Light filters through various openings, while shadows pool in unexpected corners. Around me, tunnels, chambers and voids unfold like an imaginary city, at once familiar and disorienting. This is “Innercity”, the centerpiece of Antony Gormley’s exhibition “What Holds Us” at Galleria Continua in the Italian hill town of San Gimignano in Tuscany, the first time the British artist uses cardboard and one of the most immersive works he has ever created.

Known for landmark public installations such as “Angel of the North” in Gateshead, England, and “Event Horizon” in New York City, and celebrated through major exhibitions at leading institutions worldwide from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Uffizi Gallery in Florence and Rodin Museum in Paris to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery Singapore and Long Museum in Shanghai, Gormley is among the most influential sculptors of his generation—making it all the more surprising to encounter his works in the intimate medieval setting of San Gimignano, where ancient stone streets, preserved tower houses and Romanesque and Gothic architecture provide an unexpectedly resonant backdrop for his latest investigations into the body, architecture and human presence.

For more than five decades, Gormley has used sculpture to investigate what it means to inhabit a body in the world. Rather than treating the body as an object to be represented, he approaches it as a site of experience, consciousness and sensation. In an age increasingly shaped by screens and virtual encounters, he champions first-hand physical experience, viewing sculpture as a vital counterweight to digital abstraction that can reconnect us with the immediacy of our bodies, our surroundings and the present moment. Whether in lead, iron, concrete, stone, clay or cardboard, his figures ask us to become more aware of our own presence and our relationship to the spaces we occupy.

Running until September 13, “What Holds Us” unfolds throughout the gallery’s former cinema-theater and medieval architecture. At its entrance, monumental basalt sculptures lean precariously against 14th-century walls, reversing the traditional role of the caryatid and quietly speaking to visitors. Elsewhere, massive terracotta forms balance against one another like fragile houses of cards. The show culminates in “Innercity”, a walkable—or “crawl-able”—maze of 15 colossal cardboard body-buildings that transform architecture into anatomy and invite visitors to rediscover the world with the joy of a child. The market has long recognized the significance of Gormley’s work, with the sculptures in the exhibition commanding prices ranging from £250,000 to £975,000.

“What Holds Us” is a fitting expression of Gormley’s enduring practice: a body of work that remains deeply rooted in the human condition while continually finding new ways to make us experience space, matter and ourselves anew. I sit down with the artist and found him much as his work suggests: exceptionally articulate, deeply philosophical and endlessly curious, moving effortlessly between sculpture, architecture, urbanism and the fundamental questions that have continuously animated his oeuvre—what it means to be alive and where do we stand in relation to nature and our environment.

What interested you in the basalt works in the first room of the “What Holds Us” exhibition?

I thought to start this exhibition with these three two-time life-size volcanic forms that reverse the function of the caryatid. I wanted to, with these three works, go back to this question of how the body has been integrated into architecture because that’s where we all, or most of us, live now. The three works do not represent, idealize or narrativize the body, but express our dependency on our built environment. I wasn’t expecting these rough blocks, which are worked by mechanical means on their lateral surfaces, to carry so much feeling. I am moved by them because there’s an uncanny tension between the scale of the work and their vulnerability, and their acceptance of dependability on the 14th-century walls. I find them evocative of states of feeling, while being blocks of igneous rock stacked in the simplest way. They are monumental in scale, but each in a different way carries a feeling of uncertainty.

How did you come to use cardboard for the first time in “Innercity”?

There’s a huge contrast between that first room of the basalt and this material that has evolved in parallel with the age of online shopping. Twenty billion packets are delivered annually by Amazon. That means four packets for every living being, and we already know that actually that method of delivery is only available to less than half of the world. So that must mean that each of us is receiving at least eight packets from Amazon annually. I went to cardboard for practical reasons because I think my carbon footprint is bad enough as it stands. I could have made this out of steel, but I couldn’t justify making another work that wouldn’t have a home. So a practical solution in the first place, but then in engaging with the cardboard industry, I realized what a powerful metaphor it is for our time.

Why is it important that viewers crawl, bend and physically enter the work?

That’s the point: to lose the decorum of the rules of engagement of a gallery or a museum that you are expected to view the works from a certain distance. Here the point is that you don’t see the show if you don’t get down on your hands and knees and go inside the sculpture. It would be a failure if people didn’t go inside.

What do you hope people experience inside the work?

I want you to experience the distinction between the attraction of the promise of discovering the content of a box, and then the actual internal experience of it. Once you take that invitation and go in and spend a bit of time in them, those internal volumes are not predictable from the outside. You look at something from the outside and you may be able even to read its reference to a body at rest. The inside is strangely dimensionless, if you relax and give up trying to find an image or a story and just look at the way light comes in, maybe you’ll reconnect to the emotional potential of architecture to make you feel more aware of the relation between light and dark, the possibility of a view through, up or out. In order to understand the out, you have to be in. That was the other thing that was important to me: the reconciliation or dissolving of the dualities of inside and out, of open and closed, and going through the bodies is easier than going between them.

Your practice now spans cast iron, Corten steel, concrete, stone, aluminum and terracotta—how do you decide which material best embodies a particular idea?

The material tells me. People often ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” Well, the ideas are in the work; every work in some sense is the mother of the next work. What you have to do is spend time living with the work and listen to what it’s trying to tell you. I’d never worked with basalt in this way, but we’ve been doing a lot of stacked work, and you could say there’s a conversation about stacking within the show, between the clay, terracotta and stone works. It was terracotta that made me turn to stone and find a way that allows it to express itself.

Across five decades, your work has continually evolved while remaining deeply consistent in its inquiry. What still feels unresolved or urgent in your exploration of the body today?

It’s unresolved and won’t be resolved. There is no resolution. Every work is a question. I will continue to ask questions, and try not to make statements. The bigger questions of where art fits in the world and what sculpture is good for remain open. The way in which sculpture has been used either by ideological regimes or political hegemonies is a long history. Finding again what is sculpture’s purpose in a world that is already so deeply unsure about where value really sits, the seeming incompatibility of price and value, it’s urgent to me that we return to what sculpture can do in terms of grounding us, situating us in the present time and in a context, and this has nothing to do with storytelling and everything to do with being.