Curriculum Vitae

Born England, 1965.
Lives and works in London.

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS

2006        Sean Henry: Sculpture, Cartwright Hall, Bradford, UK
2006        You're Not The Same, Forum Gallery, New York and Los Angeles
2005        Sculpture and Drawings, Kunsthandel Frans Jacobs, Amsterdam, Holland
2004        Here and Now, Berkeley Square Gallery, London
2004        Sculpture in the Workplace, Canary Wharf, London
2002        Sculpture & Drawings, Forum Gallery, New York and Los Angeles
2001        Sculpture & Drawings, Berkeley Square Gallery, London
1999        A Pilgrimage, Davies & Tooth, London , UK (Villiers David Prize Exhibition)
1998        The Centre of the Universe Circolo Degli Artisti, Faenza, Italy.
1997        Up Against it Air Gallery, London.
1995        New Sculpture and Drawings John Natsoulas Gallery, California, USA.
1994        The Flip-side of Dominic Hyde Holdsworth Gallery, Sydney, Australia.
1991        Seven Heads John Natsoulas Gallery, California, USA.
1988        Inner Visions 2,Michaelson & Orient Gallery, London.

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2006        Art Miami, Florida, USA (Osborne Samuel - formerly Berkeley Square Gallery)
Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, Florida, USA (Osborne Samuel - formerly Berkeley Square Gallery)
Tefaf Maastricht (Kunsthandel Frans Jacobs)
Umedalen Skulpturepark, Umea, Sweden
Gallerie Stefan Anderson, Umea, Sweden
2005        Eigse Festival, Carlow Ireland
Sculpture, Soloman Gallery, Dublin, Ireland
2004        Durham Sculpture Show
Sculpture at Goodwood
Art Miami, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Art Chicago (Berkeley Square Gallery)
2003        Art Miami, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery)
2002        Art Miami, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Art Chicago (Berkeley Square Gallery)
'About Face', Croydon Clocktower Museum, UK (Oct 2002 - Jan 2003)
'Thinking Big' Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (Sept 2002- Feb 2003)
2001        Art Miami, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery and
Forum Gallery)
Art 2001, London, UK (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Art Chicago (Forum Gallery)
Salon de Mars, Geneva, Switzerland (Berkeley Square Gallery)
2000        Classicismi Metropolitani, Rome, Italy
Art Miami Florida, USA (with Berkeley Square Gallery)
Palm Beach Modern & Contemporary Art Fair, Florida, USA (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Art 2000, London, UK (Berkeley Square Gallery)
Art Chicago (Forum Gallery)
1999        Eigse Carlow Arts Festival Carlow, Ireland (featured Artist).
Group Show Ann Nathan Gallery, Chicago, USA.
Art ?99 London, UK.
Glasgow Art Fair ?99, Scotland.
Artists of Fame and Promise Beaux Arts, Bath, UK.
1998        Art ?98 London, UK.
Group Show Beaux Arts, Bath, UK.
Atlantic Crossing Barbican, London.
1997        Contemporary British Art The Leferve Gallery, London.
34th Exhibition The Society of Sculptors, London.
Contemporary Art The Air Gallery, London.
Summer show Blue Gallery, London, UK.
Glasgow Art Fair Scotland.
New Movement in Contemporary Figurative Sculpture Nevada Institute of Contemporary Art, USA.
Art ?97 London, UK.
1996        Summer show Blue Gallery, London, UK.
Artists of Fame and Promise Beaux Arts, Bath, UK.
Robert Arneson Tribute Exhibition John Natsoulas Gallery & John Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, California, USA.
1995        IV Mostra Mercato Faenza Faience, Faenza, Italy.
New Work Sacremento Club, California, USA.
The Figure John Natsoulas Gallery, California, USA.
1994        Holdsworth Galleries, Sydney, Australia.
Gallery Artists Robin Gibson Gallery, Sydney, Australia.
1993        Honolulu Academy of the Arts, Hawaii, USA.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK, ?Ceramic Contemporaries?.
1991-97        Thirty Sculptors John Natsoulas Gallery, Davis, California, USA (annual exhibition).
1991        Royal Festival Hall, London, UK (three man show).
Gallerie Marihube, New York, USA.
Special Photographers Gallery, London, UK.
Major Artists/Minor Works South Mountain Centre for the Arts, Pheonix, Arizona, USA.
The Collection, Brompton Rd, London, UK (two man show).
1990        Portobello Arts Festival Michaelson & Orient Gallery, London, UK.
Natsoulas/Novoloso Gallery, California, USA.
Gladding McBean & Co, California, USA.
1989        State Capitol Building, Sacremento, California, USA.
Art ?89, London, UK.
1988        Hannah Peschar Gallery, Ockley, Surrey, UK.

INSTALLATIONS

2005        Golden Square, London
2004        Canary Wharf, London
Le Meridien Cumberland Hotel, Marble Arch, London
2003        Lower Grainger Street, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne
2002        Paddington Central Development. London
River and Rowing Museum, Henley-On-Thames, Oxfordshire
2001        Berkeley Square, London
2000        Sculpture at Goodwood, Goodwood, West Sussex
1999        De Montford University, Leicester, UK
1996        Royal British Legion, Pall Mall, London
1995        Tower Records HQ, Sacremento, California, USA
1989        Peak Mansions, The Peak, Hong Kong
Hilton Hotel, Ankara, Turkey

GRANTS / AWARDS

1998        The Villiers David Foundation Prize
1989        British Craft Council Grant
1988        British Craft Council Grant
1987        Gane Charitable Trust Travel Scholarship to USA




Sean Henry in conversation with Tom Flynn

T: Can we start with narrative? Your most recent work - the three-figure piece which was inspired by Edward Albee's play The Goat - hints at what seems to be an underlying preoccupation in your work: to explore the narrative capabilities of sculpture. Could you talk a little bit about the importance of narrative in your sculpture.

S: In figurative sculpture the narrative is always there whether you like it or not, so people will read things into the figures - people asking me who they are, or what they do. Any figure I make will have things that mean the most to me but aren't necessarily immediately obvious to anybody else. There will be my own private motivation for making them. I've realized that if one figure looks at another it changes it completely. How the work fits together is integral to how it is perceived at that time. I don't think I can control it completely, but I want to be aware of it. About six or seven years ago I did my first double piece; it was called Man With Alter Ego, and I made two versions of the same man, and they faced each other directly. The figures have a relationship of their own and you then become a kind of voyeur. I quite like the idea of hinting at a narrative but not giving it away completely.

T: Time is integral to narrative. When you include more than one figure, time enters the equation as you move between the figures.

S: Yes, I saw two sculptures in Rome, two heads of a pope, I think by Bernini. He completed the first head and there was a flaw in the marble and the pope didn't like it, so very rapidly they did another version. In the second version the lips are slightly more open, and it's almost identical, but just slightly different. They're either side of a big fireplace in the Borghese Gallery, and as you walk from one side to the other, knowing this story, you get the sense of this head being about to speak. I think you get a much truer sense of what the sitter was like from having that double portrait, and it reminds you, I suppose, of the time taken creating the thing and the whole conceit of trying to capture a moment in time. Just experiencing it was a wonderful thing, to see the skill involved and to get the sense of Bernini focusing on that moment when the figure has just stopped speaking, or was about to speak. I was quite drawn to that.

T: When one starts looking for differences between two figures, that is where meanings are generated. This seems to be a recurring theme in what you do.

S: Yes it is, I'll have different motivations for different sculptures, obviously. With the figures of Ben, I was aware of his personality; he's an architect, he's a very good friend, very busy, so not a very good model particularly; he's a creative person and is full of ideas and always has something to say. It was interesting that when he came to the studio, just coincidentally, he had just shaved his hair off, which was a surprise. In the course of doing that sculpture, I was aware that nobody would have a clue about what he was actually like as a person. A bald head can be quite threatening and it was unusual for him to have his hair like that and so that led me to start a second portrait, just a few months later. I feel together they present a much richer exploration of what he's like as a person. I've always liked Van Dyck's triple portrait of King Charles I, front on, side on and three quarters and it looks like three different people. Side on it's the coin; front on, he looks sort of regal; and three-quarters on he looks terribly weak.

T: But in sculpture you can walk around the figure.

S: Exactly.

T: Are you trying to get beyond sculpture's limitations?

S: I'd prefer to try and think of it more positively as being aware of sculpture's potential. With this new piece I was interested in changes of scale. The first piece is four and a half feet; the next one is three feet and the next one is two feet, and they're very specifically diminishing, getting a third smaller each time. The piece was inspired specifically by the play and the fact that his character diminishes over time and I liked the idea of him physically getting smaller.

T: Viewing the sculpture, he could, of course, be moving in the other direction and getting larger.

S: Yes, that’s true. What was so mesmerising about the play was how it highlights how little anybody knows about anyone. At the start of the play, he's a successful architect, he's just won an award. He goes through the course of one evening from having everything, it seems - a beautiful wife, a beautiful house - to having nothing. I think Albee wanted to make people think 'How would you react?' It certainly made me think about that, beyond the specific, and I came away with the sense of man as an island and known only to himself. However, I don't really try and think how people are going to react to the sculpture; I don't make the sculpture for a particular audience; I just make them for myself.

T: Your figures are strikingly modern and yet your work also suggests a very keen art historical awareness, particularly the way in which you use emblematic motifs. Is it important for you to keep the range of meanings broad and fluid?

S: Yes. I'd hate to be able to pinpoint it in language; I wouldn't see the point. If I had an explanatory panel for the full meaning of every sculpture then all that does is close it all down and make it redundant. Even portraits. I don't do portraits, because people will say: "Ah, that's Bob." And then they can just put it in a pigeonhole and they don't have to think about it again. I like sculpture to be ambiguous. When I look at other work I enjoy the conundrum that you’ll never really know the artist’s motivation. You can decide how to view a sculpture - from afar, close up or you can go straight to the title, see it in the round. Each different stage gives you an insight into what might have been in the artist or sculptor's mind. So in my own work I hope that there's a degree of openness.

T: Yes, openness is a good word.

S: Yes, openness for people to interpret and to see themselves in it, I suppose. A lot of my figures are male, but I hope there's a humanity there that women can pick up on too. And if we're taking about You’re Not The Same, it’s inspired by a play, but at the end of the day it is a middle-aged man with grey hair in three altered states, getting smaller and it will exist beyond me and beyond the play and beyond everything else and hopefully have a life of its own. I wouldn't want it to require a reading of the play in order for people to appreciate it.

T: To go back to iconography, if one were to walk into a cathedral in Seville today and see a saint holding an orange, the specific meanings of that orange at the time the sculpture was made would be largely lost to many people now. We don't have a historical awareness of signs and symbols, but we do in terms of contemporary words like 'Italia' or of commercial logos such as 'Gap'.

S: Yes, that's right, there is a link. Because Ben is an architect I originally had this idea of him holding a small building in his hand, very much like the painting of a monk in Siena holding a little hill town, but I didn't even start one as I think I realised pretty early on that it wouldn’t work visually. The orange filled in and worked and was enough. I rarely have a clear idea in my mind at the beginning that I'm going to sculpt X completely; I'll have a good idea. With Ben (Ideas Resolved) and with T.P.O.L.R. - the figure with the cup - and with Italia, all of them went through various permutations before they arrived at the state they are now. But you're right, with Italia, it's a very beautiful word. It's eloquent, but it's also a football team. I like that. Nathan, the model, arrived wearing that top, so there was a fair degree of accident there. I love the whole notion of historical Italy. Whereas for him, because he's a football fan, he said, "Can you put the 03 on the sleeve because I really want to be Maldini."

T: But it serves to illustrate this point of how signs and symbols change over time. It's conceivable that your work could lose some of its contemporary meaning in 30 or 40 years' time when people might look and say 'Why is that?' and 'What would that have meant at the time?' But the word Italia also signifies an art historical tradition of painted saints, polychrome figures; there's an art historical thing for those people who want to bring that to it.

S: Yes, you’re right. Clothes have been really neglected in art, or in sculpture, and I don't really know when that started. This idea of figures having to be nude seems sort of ludicrous to me. Unless there's a contextual reason, or a specific need for nudity within the concept of the piece.

T: What would be the implications of removing the contemporary clothing? You work in a fairly specific mode. Would that place the body within a tradition that you're not happy about?

S It’s not about avoiding a tradition so much as reflecting the reality of daily life. I have done two figures that are virtually nude and I felt it was very much more about observing rather than living. They were female figures so I felt more outside the experience, whereas with male figures I feel a degree of empathy. That's just subconscious. I can't change my makeup here, the programming of my ego, or whatever it is.

T: The body may be dressed, but you still have the body.

S: Yes, bits of the body reveal themselves in nearly all of the figures so I'm certainly aware of anatomy and I'm thinking about scale and proportion all the time. I'm very interested in what clothes do to the figure. Young men's clothes generally hide the figure a lot. In The Duke of Milan you can hardly see the figure at all, whereas in the piece of Sandra or even the one of Ursula, it's just a fact of life that, at the moment, women's clothes are much more revealing. I didn't consciously decide to sculpt people with clothes on, I just always have. It seems like the most natural thing in the world.

T: One might call your sculpture, à la Manet, the sculpture of modern life, insofar as some of the quality of the modern world in your work carries a particular social charge. They're not just dressed in any clothes, they're dressed as real working people, dressed unremarkably, who seem to be animated by thought and that aspect seems particularly noteworthy when they're located in a public space. I'm thinking particularly of the figures in Newcastle. Can you comment on how you see your figures working in a public environment?

S: It's very exciting putting works in a public zone. Primarily because you feel they're still functioning; they have a role. This is not always the case with private collections. Whereas the outdoor pieces in London, and the piece in Newcastle and the piece in the Cumberland Hotel, they're in very busy environments and it's exciting just purely from a creator's point of view seeing people coming across them for the first time and engaging with them. What's also interesting about outdoor sculpture is that at the end of the day you can't control it at all. At Holland Park I chose the site in the winter when it was bare trees and looked beautiful for a solitary walking figure on a concrete path. But of course in the summer the trees are full of leaves and it became quite dark in that site and he definitely became more threatening than he did in the winter, which was something I had not anticipated. At Goodwood every time I go there it looks slightly different. There's a degree of giving up control, which is quite healthy and good. You just do the best you can and then the thing takes on a life of its own and probably has different meanings to different people at different times of the year.

T: You seem to be interested in the potential for sculpture to be more theatrical, in exploring the connections between sculpture and theatre.

S I think that's right. There are interesting links between sculpture and theatre. There are good examples in the past of sculpture being used very theatrically, like Niccolò Dell'Arca's Lamentation over the Dead Christ in Bologna, which shows the women shrieking, with their robes flying, and they're all running to the Dead Christ. That's actually set up in a church like a theatre piece. I'm not sure I was particularly aware of it before but The Goat did trigger that sort of response. It was quite inspiring. At the end of the play there is this moment where the three characters - the wife, the son and the best friend - are stage left and the main character is kneeling stage right and none of them move. It's the very end of the play and it just struck me as pure sculpture, a vivid tableau that spoke volumes. The wife is bolt upright, fists clenched, glaring down at him. His best friend is turning away, like Judas who has betrayed him, looking off stage left. His son is confused, and is sort of gesturing between the two parents, his father down on the ground. It's pure sculpture.

T: The Villiers David Prize allowed you to tour Italy and engage with the canon of classical and Renaissance sculpture. That was clearly a fertile learning period for you. I understand you even took in the amazing Sacro Monte at Varallo.

S: Yes, that was a fantastic opportunity for a guilt-free, four-month trip around Italy and I was able to seek out and immerse myself in many historical works.

T: You were already working in polychrome by that point.

S: Yes, I’ve always been interested in its potential. It's been quite interesting to discover just how much sculpture over the centuries has been painted, including the Parthenon frieze, many figures in churches, right up until, at some point it became very unfashionable to paint sculpture, but to me it was a happy coincidence because I was doing it already.

T: Well, of course, this recurs throughout the nineteenth century, with artists standing up at the Society of Arts and saying, "If artists as respected as the ancient Greeks painted their sculptures, then it must be OK for us."

S: Yes. There's a little Roman head in the Bargello Museum, painted I think by Donatello who gave it rouged cheeks and red lips, and it's a beautiful object and it just takes it into another realm. Obviously there are practical reasons where it's different - climate and with outdoor work when it's particularly hard to get the paint to last. With my figures I can't necessarily claim that in 100 years they will look as vivid as they do now.

T: But that's quite good, isn't it, it's part of the whole process of degenerating...

S: That's right, it keeps the surface alive, I think, and is reflective of the world we live in and is 'correct' to my mind.

T: I wanted to ask you about the historical fear of colour, or what the artist and writer David Batchelor has termed 'chromophobia'. When used on the body, colour has been a stock taboo in the history of art. Has colour ever been a problem for you? Was it something you had to surmount or work through and beyond?

S: No, I never had that fear in the first place, which was very liberating. I don't know why that is, but I'm probably more inspired now by painting than I am by sculpture because I just love what can be achieved with colour. Other artists have been drawn to it too. I'm thinking of Giacometti applying paint to his later works. They did have colour. We think of his bronzes as just bronze and yet there are various bronzes that did have paint on. Probably more impactful were ten figures I saw in a church Verona and they were painted marble. I assumed they were wood and then realised they were marble.

T: Presumably patinated bronze didn't give you the specificity you require to communicate aspects of contemporary life?

S: Well, the traditional brown is just a repulsive, repellent kind of shininess which doesn't invite you into the humanity of the person. Occasionally there are exceptions... Rodin springs to mind. Some of the poses might seem rather corny, but then he gets beyond that just by the sheer guts and raw emotion, sexuality, whatever it is, so that you forget the less attractive parts of the bronze and focus on the clay.

T: You're painting the figures naturalistically, but you only go so far, clearly there's a point at which you stop. You seem to want to leave a certain porosity. Can you talk about where those boundaries lie?

S: It's to do with the mass of the figures, which actually links into what we're saying about bronze being too polished, so you become aware of the surface. My figures are generally matt, although I'm starting to use little bits of varnish or wax here and there. If I want the brow or forehead to catch the light, I'll put a bit of a sheen on it. I'm aware there's a kind of openness to the clay body, a slight texture to the clay that seems to be enough to me. I want to sculpt to the point where it's working visually. I'm not sure why this is, but I've never been drawn to real hair or glass eyes. There's a generality to my figures, although looking around the studio now they seem very alive to me. They seem to be doing enough.

T: So you can impart a psychology that people often wrongly associate with verisimilitude without actually making something photorealistic.

S: Yes, I think so. That probably reads a bit like laziness, but it isn't. I often spend months on it! In a way overworked objects can get deader somehow. Certainly waxworks are hopelessly dead and it's to do with body casts. A lot of artists are drawn to using body casts and I can't for the life of me see why because they're such deadened objects and they rarely even look anything like the person. The tradition of casting the body comes from death masks; I think that's where it started and the technology has improved and you can do it quite easily but that kind of realism just doesn’t work for me.

T: That great psychological presence you get wouldn't be achievable if you'd either gone too far or had not gone far enough.

S: I'm drawn to poses that make sense over time. They're not hugely active, they're not leaping around and yet they are not all totally sedentary; they're generally poses that you could at least hold for a few moments, if not longer. I'm aware of gravity when I'm sculpting the clothes. I'm also aware of it being an artefact, I suppose, despite the fact that I talk about them in relationship to me. At the end of the day it's an object. There's a point in sculpting when you start to lose that sense of weight and gravity if you put buttons on or start sculpting shoelaces. At some point you just have to stop and there's enough. The eye fills in the gaps. Nobody ever says, 'Where are the buttons?' It's just not necessary.
Going back to scale, the thing about scale is if you cast a lifesize head and you hold the cast of that head in your hands, it's a very disagreeable object, its unpleasant. It's just a totally instinctive thing that human beings have, I think - a slight repulsion towards their exact replicas and certainly by reducing the scale of the sculpture you get much more empathy for the objects. I remember seeing a little Netherlandish figure of a woman in a museum in Holland. It was probably 18 or 20 inches high, beautiful, kind of pre-Renaissance, 13th or 14th century, slope-shouldered, with a little fresh face, and she was totally alive. It had everything, you could imagine her alive, and was not a toy in any way shape or form and it was very small. There's an empathy. The fact that Ron Mueck's Dead Dad is only three or four feet long is the key to its success. With Catafalque I went much over life size. But life-size is a broad-brush term because people come in many sizes. I work from my own scale and on the almost life-size figures I'm scaling it up.

T: Are you conscious of your sculpture being a traditional way of working. Is that an important thing to you?

S: I suppose some would say it is laughably traditional to be working in clay and casting in bronze and making anything by hand and that certainly doesn't fit into what a lot of contemporary artists are doing. I don't know if it's my background, but there seems to be so much to be done and said in painting and sculpting and I'm doing both. I'd like to paint more and I'm drawing more and enjoying drawing more.

T: So drawing is important to you?

S: Drawing is getting more important, I think, in that it has become an activity in itself; the drawing is quite a creative release in a way. I rarely draw a sculpture in advance. I'll make maquettes or occasionally just go straight in and try and sculpt. I may regret it later; you know, I'll change the hands twenty or thirty times and I'll think I probably should have had a clearer idea of what I was aiming for with that piece. The sculptures are generally taking longer than they did before, probably because I've got more exacting standards for myself or it takes more to satisfy me.

T: But do you see it as part of the process of sculpture?

S: Sculpting is drawing, in a way. The way that I work is really drawing in space. I'll work on the foot and the head and then I'll turn it and you're looking at the outside lines as the piece moves, so it's certainly very helpful to draw for motivational reasons but I'm not dogmatic about it. I've taken to carrying a notebook with me and increasingly I'm working out ideas more fully in advance. With my shows I need to be as aware as possible of how pieces fit together and drawing can help a lot with that in terms of working out the spaces around objects and the spaces between objects and that sort of thing. So I'm drawing a bit more like an engineer rather than life drawing.

T: Does this series of works mark for you a transitional point into a more ambitious phase or is it merely part of an ongoing process?

S: I’m not sure I can answer that. There are some exciting possibilities. What I liked about You’re Not the Same is that it took me out of myself. It was quite a refreshing piece to do.

T: Have you thought any more about people recognising Jonathan Pryce? How much will you want to reveal about the genesis of this project without going in directions you don't want to lead people?

S: Because of my general phobia of portraiture I'm a bit anxious about it because the tendency is to say, "This is what happened," and "This is the person" and to lay out too much of my own story. It will hopefully work on different levels for different people. Some people may recognise him. They may not know why they recognise him. Some people say to me, "It looks like you."

T: They do say that artists creating portraits are always essentially creating self-portraits. How true is that?

S: Well, it's very frustrating if you're doing a twenty-year old girl in jeans and people say it looks like me! I fight it with all my might!

T: She wouldn't be very pleased either!

S: No, but it just happens without me. I've always admired Jonathan Pryce. It wasn't random. Although I'd very strongly say it's not a portrait of him in any case; it's inspired by his character, Martin, in The Goat. I made notes and sketches sitting in the audience and then latched onto these moments, because it's full of pauses. Any kind of acting has these moments where figures are pausing and it is this moment that I try and get in a lot of my figures. It's a degree of subtlety in the figures that I think is really important. This is why I don't use professional art models, because they're totally absent mentally. They say, "How do you want me to stand?" and they stand very still, but they don't engage with you and don't want you to engage with them, whereas with friends and actors who can take on a character, it works. There is my pre-knowledge of who they are and what they do.

T: This idea of arrested movement is interesting, because it seems to be intimately related to the figure's internal thought, to psychology. Your work seems to be more to do with psychology than to do with the body.

S: I think so. I think with Catafalque, which was a big piece for me, his eyes are open and he's lying on a catafalque of some kind, but he's definitely looking at the sky and that is really about the psychology, isn't it, rather than the who, or the when and the why. Catafalque is much more about our place in the world and trying to make sense of what we're doing and why we're here. That's constantly on my mind. The feeling that these chairs we're sitting on in this room will be here longer than you and I; you know, it's shocking, it's really shocking. All our illusions of home ownership and family, and...

T: Is this what you meant by Folly? I know that work entitled Folly has occasionally been interpreted in terms of an architectural folly, but I read that work as the folly of the human condition.

S: Definitely folly of the human condition. You know, houses are built - bang, bang, bang - so you go to sleep at night secure in the comfort of your own home and in London that means you're about four feet from the people in the other house with their bed against the wall going to sleep in their home. And it's repeated down the whole terrace and there's a moment at three in the morning when, you know... It's quite sad, this illusion of structure. You try to stop things, but...

T: One can talk about the folly of the human condition and yet it's not only the furniture in this room that will outlive you and I. Your works, because of the material you work in, will outlive us too.

S: I don't know what will happen to them or where they will be, or if anyone will know what they are or where they came from. But they serve a purpose in my own life; there's a kind of self-awareness that comes from making them, whether they're figures of me or other people, an awareness of who we are, a looking, and probably a degree of yearning to capture something. Change is something that happens in everybody's life and generally we don't like it. When people say, "You've changed", the implication of that phrase is, "You've let me down." Some people cope with it better than others, but it really cuts to the heart of life, your family and how well you can cope. You see it in a lot of writing, a lot of music, that memory or notion of a time when you were all happy,...there’s that moment.

T: Do you worry that the costume, the contemporary dress, could ultimately have the same effect as the dress on Duane Hanson's tourist figures, which we look at now and think of very much as period pieces.

S: That's true and for instance I'm aware now that a suit is much more invisible to a large section of the population than canvas trousers and rolled-up shirt, which is what I might wear. Initially I started mimicking my own clothes because they were as neutral as anything I could think of. Now I'm much more fascinated by how people react to clothes. Certainly the man lying with his head on the briefcase, people can read into his mental space much more quickly. They don't say, "Why is he wearing a suit?" Somehow it's just generic. A female figure I'm working on at the moment...we've talked about the clothes quite specifically; it creates a context...where the blackness of the jacket gives her a certain confidence and the shoes are quite structured. She came in one pair of shoes I didn't like particularly and then we talked about a boot with a kind of sculptural heel, a big heel that would be incongruous when she is lying down. It's great when there's a sort of arbitrary synthesis between ideas. Nathan turning up with an Italia shirt on. Perfect.

T: You've been influenced as much by painters as by sculptors. You've said that Cranach, for example, has been important for you.

S: Cranach is not the most fashionable of painters at the best of times, but there's an incredible amount of stuff going on. He's painted the same woman numerous times and in a very modern way. I’d say he knew this woman very well indeed. She's a very knowing presence. I have drawn on the psychology of his paintings more than the specific allegorical meanings. This woman he painted could be alive now... and it was 1537... yet she's vividly real. The Baroque seems so fey and monied and fake, but there was a period before that when you can really see the humanity in the portrayal. It is strange to look back that far, but it's inspiring at the same time and it pushes me to work harder and not to be complacent about what I'm making and to try and hone down what worked in the last piece and what didn't work in the last piece and try and resolve those things.

T: What piece have you been most pleased with?

S: I was very pleased with Catafalque in its Canary Wharf site. That was a really lucky break that I could put this three-ton sculpture of a man in such a busy place with thousands of people going to work, walking past him. He was like a kind of eddy in a river of humanity and the people would drift off the edge of the tide going into Canary Wharf at 9.00 in the morning and would sort of stand around the sculpture and would have a cigarette and someone would look at the sky and wonder where he was looking. I felt that was really impacting as much as any work can on a specific environment and so I feel that moment made me aware of the context and not just the making of the figure. The making of the figure is one thing, but what you do with it afterwards is almost equally important.

T: Yes, because people do stop with your figures and pause and find them rather curious, where they don't with historical bronze figures.

S: Yes, I'm fortunate with that. Perhaps the subjects I choose, or the colour, there's a kind of familiarity about it. Even with the Walking Man. Probably the nicest thing anyone has said...I heard from a third party, someone had told them, "Oh I saw this amazing figure in the park today. I just wanted to give him a hug." Which is saying something. And it's a bald, six and a half foot bronze figure of a man walking along. Funnily enough men are much more standoffish with it, you know, "Who are you?" But that's a success of some kind.

T: It's when they start making love to it that you need to worry...

S: Yes, yes!