Antony Gormley: why sculpture is far superior to painting

Antony Gormley: In the beginning was the thing! The reason I chose sculpture as a vocation was to escape words, to communicate in a physical way. It was a means of confronting the way things were, of getting to know them in material terms.

The origins of making physical objects go back to before the advent of Homo sapiens, earlier even than the appearance of our Neanderthal cousins. Sculpture emerges from material culture. At the beginning there was an urge to make objects and you could argue that making them was the catalyst for the emergence of the modern mind.

Martin Gayford: The earliest sculpture so far discovered is often held to be a little figure that is an amalgam of an animal and a man’s body: two easily recognisable items stuck together; you might say this is a three-dimensional collage. It’s called the ‘Löwenmensch’ or ‘Lion Man’ (though some have wondered if it’s actually a cave bear, or female, a lioness-woman).