God, this stuff gives me the creeps
No, I really had too much to do with it
Having been through that period in the late seventies
thinking about what this extraordinary material is
and having eaten a lot of it
I never want to have anything to do with it again
I guess what interested me about this is the material seems to express something about our relationship
with the material world
Here is a foodstuff that in a way has come as far as it can from the organic
Here it is, it’s square, it’s been divided
its metonymy is now of absolute 8mm thick slices
It’s made out of wheat flour that has been bleached
So this is like the industrialisation of the very stuff of life
the thing on which we depend
and I guess at the time I was just very, very interested in looking at how
in the manner of a Carl Andre you can begin to demonstrate in a sense the unit
repeated unit base of…
Wow, that smell just drives me…
I mean it’s just scary
I think that the whole generation of American artists
from Carl Andre, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Smithson
influenced me enormously
I think there was a straightforwardness about the way that they were thinking about process and material
and the origin of material
I guess I wanted to take those procedures
which were to do with I think pragmatics but also trying to find as it were within the
texture of daily life something that could then carry a thought and a feeling
What I needed to do was offset the layers
so that you had a sort of bond
between one layer and another
I would simply eat my way through as much as I could take
in order to make the equivalent volume in two halves of my body
This is a construction
made out of 600 loafs of Mothers Pride
that have been as it were deconstructed
and then reconstructed in a new way to make this sort of mattress
but that it is actually a meditation among the fundamental processes of both art and life
This is the first work that really set me
on this path to thinking about the body as a found object
It was certainly the first work in which the body was identified
in this case by tooth marks rather than a lid, skin