This was the very first one, this was actually found by my brother Nigel.
You won't believe how beautiful this is by the way, look at that. And that's the very
first fossil we found but we thought it was a miracle.
You know people ask where the ideas come from.
What I don't know if ideas are very
useful in making art, so I think the great basis of a lot of the work is the
work one's just finished or the work one's doing. I mean, in the studio I'm making
about 34 works right now. Some of them I have been making for
two and a half, three years and I suppose they'll never come to an end.
And then other things, just a few weeks ago, have just started and who
knows, there is no guarantee. This is like a painter's palette. I don't like to
use analogy with painting but it is. This is a palette where I can move
the material around and find my own path through the material I suppose.
My first wife was born and raised in Wuppertal and I have to say being here
has been very kind to me. People have been very kind, very generous, very supportive.
When do you think we can have it? Two weeks?
You think so?
All right, it's beginning to look really
good isn't it? I hope it fits with the other one
I have to be there, I have to see it, I have to respond to it to make the next
decisions and as well as studios, I have the people here,
my assistants here because then I can keep an eye on everything and I'm here
everyday and checking and making, working with them. Considering the
fact that noboby is going to see this at 7 meters high but it's beautifully made.
I have to say they've done a great job on this. Fantastic.
I wanted to make work that has - steel work - that has a totally non-industrial
basis to it. Just pure fantasy, there is no natural model for it.
Did you get this bit ready? Is that it is it? It's just being glued.
Can we just see what that looks like when that's up there?
We're making it now in polystyrene
and then what we're going to have to cut it all apart,
document it. Very, very carefully cut it apart and every single bit, every single
fraction is going have to be cast in steel and then reassembled and sealed.
It's going to be a real job to do that but I think it's going look very exciting.
I'm excited to see it that's all. That's why you do things.
You can go to the foundry and they say: 'No sorry, it can't be done, which is always good to hear
because then you know nobody else did it. You see this one here, this
has just arrived coming from the foundry now. I'm not going to try to pick it up
because it's an enormous weight. That comes together.
This has been a real challenge for the foundry to make.
That's not my job just to make their life difficult but I need to get the things
out I want to have, the forms I want to make.
If you have a massive material in front of you and you move it around, there are just
endless possibilities. It's infinite. Really the job
is to actually find out where it becomes more meaningful and where you feel
this is something that some correspondence but I can't preempt that
strangely enough. It may well be that tomorrow [laughs] - they shouldn't hear this -
could be that there is tomorrow we have to take the whole thing down and start again.
I have just been very fortunate because there is a certain set of themes and things
I'm interested in, that just have fascinated me since I'm a kid;
like the geology, like all sorts of natural relations to natural history,
the landscape. The interest is the material, the materials we find around us.
Even the stacks I made; part of the intention was to make geological blocks
That is what I drew. I literally drew the first invitation card I did was of a geological block
with all the different strata inside it.
I love sculpture, I think i'm fascinated by what other people make and how they
make it and what it means. So I'm a real sculpture fan.
We've done, I think now, 45
exhibitions of sculptor's work. I didn't know it was going to take up so much time.
Actually, to be honest, that's a fantastic experience that I enjoy.
Culture is an enormously dynamic and dramatically developing discipline and
it's one of the only uses of material that's not utilitarian. It is literally just
about new forms and new ideas and new emotional experiences.
When you see how ugly everything is built: simple geometries, flat, straight edge,
boring right angle, a repetitive and inferior world we build in a sense.
Sculpture is the only one that actually builds something crazy and interesting