Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality.
Movement, change, light, growth, and decay are the life-blood of nature, the energies that I try to tap through my work.
My art recognizes the human place, the human context – especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.
The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.
When I do the permanent projects or the big projects, when a work is finished, that’s the beginning of its life.
I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful.
Complete control can be the death of a work.
When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.
I love the winter. Well, I love all the seasons, but the winter is possibly one of the most intense.
Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There’s something very powerful about finding snow in summer.
I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.
The British climate, although it is very wet, it is quite mild in winter. We don’t get these severe – generally don’t get severe winters.
A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it. It is different than patience. It is not thinking. It is working with the rhythm.
The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what’s going on and what’s happening outside.
Beauty is what sustains things, although beauty is underwritten by pain and fear.
If I’m going to understand the land, I have to understand the wind, the snow, the rain, the leaves, the ice, and changes in temperature. It just reflects a reality for me.
At its most successful, my ‘touch’ looks into the heart of nature; most days I don’t even get close. These things are all part of a transient process that I cannot understand unless my touch is also transient – only in this way can the cycle remain unbroken and the process be complete.
There’s a huge number of things that are occurring with the ice works which fascinate me enormously, but it’s driven by this kind of frantic race against time. And whilst that creates a huge amount of tension and problems, it’s a tension that I think I feed off.
Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next.
The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience.