MEMBERS of the public took centre stage in Antony Gormley’s fourth plinth project in Trafalgar Square yesterday, after a protester unofficially became the first “living sculpture”.
The artwork, entitled One & Other, will see 2,400 people occupy the plinth for an hour each, 24 hours a day, for 100 days.
The demonstrator, who said he was Stuart Holmes, from Manchester, clambered over protective netting surrounding the plinth, just minutes before the project officially began.
But, after encouragement by sculptor Gormley to “do the gentlemanly thing”, he was carried away by a JCB at 9am, when its first official occupant, 35-year-old housewife Rachel Wardell, from Sleaford, Lincolnshire, took her place.
Gormley later described the protester as “an excellent warm-up act if the whole thing is about freedom of speech”.
