More than two years ago, in a conversation about my work with Emmanuel Copper, I mentioned an eighteenth century teapot in the form of a cabbage which had caught my attention in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Copper observed that this interest on my part seemed slightly incongruous, given the general absence of organic references in my work, and ended with the thought that he would be intrigued to find out what I ultimately made of the cabbage teapot. Another totally disparate influence on my current work was my response to a gun box, a beautifully polished wooden box precisely crafted to contain eighteenth century dueling pistols. Inside the box, however, there were no pistols. It was like a forensic examination where the body has been removed and the outline remains. The cut-out so vividly mapped where the pistols had been that you could almost see them, but the treasure was gone. If the pistols had been there I would probably not have arrived at this current work. The void allowed me to transpose my teapot into the empty space.
展开▼
