When you enter your studio, what is the first thing you do?

Turn off the alarm. Feel a sense of relief like a homecoming. I have been working in this building on Leonard Street for 39 years and it feels like an extension of me.

On the ground floor I will look at anything that I have recently made that is hung on the walls hoping to get a ‘fresh’ view. I have so much invested in any artwork I make, it's hard to see it clearly. I want it to work of course, I fear I am kidding myself of course. I try to see it as if I were someone else. Impossible but that morning glance can be close. On the second floor I walk past a lot of other people’s art that I keep in the studio almost like a gallery. Sometimes I will stop and look at one work in particular, basking in its power. I have contemporary works and on the third floor a lot of older things going back hundreds, thousands and even millions of years to Homo Erectus hand axes. I work on this top floor and as I start the computer, I feel a strong sense of calm and purpose.

I sit at the computer for much of the day drawing new projects and finalising fabrication of works that are under way. I keep an eye on my inbox answering questions from my 12 colleagues who work in an adjacent building, or from my 12 galleries around the world or from the unpredictable "outside". I liken it to having a fishing net spread wide and occasionally hauling it in, seeing what I have caught. It makes a break from focused drawing, and you never know what might be there. Wacky fan mail, annoying news of a technical problem, an offer of a major museum show (I wish) or a request for an interview….

How would you describe your workspace and the atmosphere there?

Well, the aforementioned studio is a mid-19th century terraced brick building. Very handsome. It was made as part of a work/live estate that included a huge church and a school and it's just north of the financial district of the City of London. Back then they built furniture in this area bringing supplies up from the Thames. The floors were covered in old glue when I bought the building. I sanded them all down. 

My other studio building is 180 steps away on Luke Street and is less pretty but a bit bigger, built at the turn of the century. Each of the five floors has a different function which really helps my day of working. I can go in and talk hand craft on one floor or screen production and printing on another. VR and computer animation on the next and office work and planning on the top floor. It’s like mental compartments and feels very clear to discuss just those matters and then move on. I go over there a couple of times a day and the rest of the time I’m pretty much on my own back in Leonard Street. 

The whole area is named after saints. It’s got quite a religious history as an area, with Wesley’s original church up the road and Bunhill (BoneHill) burial grounds at the end of the road where John Bunyan (Pilgrim’s Progress) and Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe) are buried. Their monuments are next to some 2000 other stone graves of previous Londoners. At the other end of the street is Curtain Road where Shakespeare built his ‘Curtain Theatre’ before he moved to the Globe Theatre South of the River.

 

 Is there an object you always keep close while working? 

Yes, a tape measure - I need to translate ideas and possible works into the reality of scale, and the tape measure is the first step from mind to real space. The next step is often to build that thing in Virtual Reality...VR. I have an assistant over in Luke Street who is very good at that and I can put on the goggles and see what he has built. We usually use an existing gallery space where I have already made a show, like the Knokke gallery, to place the work within and I can see how it might look. I can adjust the scale and see what is working well. A lot of what I do is mental picturing and this is a great new tool that allows this in a very real way.

Beyond the human figure, does architecture appear in your work? How does it interact with your subjects?

Basically, until the mid 90s I did not draw people. I started my career sculpting domestic objects that told stories, things in your home or your pockets. Some years on I felt burdened by the literal meaning of these things and eventually dropped all direct references except perhaps to a generic sense of "abstract forms”. This slowly moved towards architectural interiors and then buildings themselves. By the early 90s I was building replicas of actual buildings and slowly started to add to this vocabulary with animals, trees and eventually people. I drew on existing languages of signage, toys and graphics. The people were drawn from lavatory symbols for men and women which I bought in the furniture supply shops around my studio. Having found a way to draw bodies I applied the same logic to draw faces. I have continued to draw people and animals and buildings ever since, also incorporating the background environments of landscape and cityscapes.

Sometimes these might combine within a work or more often I will create a kind of diorama within a gallery with objects in front of landscapes, sculptures in front of paintings. A recent show in Berlin has animated walking children moving amongst giant, freestanding metal drawings of London towers. 

 Could you tell us about your collaborations with musicians and bands?

Best not to over-emphasise this, I don’t hang out in smoky cafes with leather clad rock bands. I was asked by a design company to propose an album cover for Blur and a similar process occurred with U2. I was approached directly for artworks by Saint Etienne and Brian Adams, who paid me with music tracks. As part of a collaboration with the choreographer Wayne McGregor, I met Max Richter and swapped an album cover for a music track. When I need music for one of my works, I use musicians I have come into contact with, paying them to write something specifically for me. Paul Englishby, Archie Wingate, and others. In a few cases I have “composed” tracks myself though these are on the edge of being music really, more like organised sounds. 

What sounds or music accompany you as you create?

Today I am playing on repeat a track I heard in a driverless car in LA. A spacey relaxing mood ambient thing. I can’t listen to anything too engaging and certainly nothing with lyrics as I need to focus. I range from Choral, chants, spa music, and a lot of ambient techno and dance music.

Is there a technique or material you haven’t explored yet but would like to?

I move through materials and techniques as they become useful or noticed. At the moment I am using marble mosaic, carved stone, carved oak and plywood, VR, LED screens, LCD screens, inkjet printing, silkscreen printing, computer cut vinyl sheet, laser-cut acrylic and spray painted aluminium, galvanised steel girders, poured concrete, 3D printing, sewn wooden beads, hand painted canvases, lenticulars, wallpaper, Ai imaging, fibreglass, laser-cut felt …

Is there an unusual or unexpected place where you’d like to show an installation?

I feel like the artist is the girl at the disco who waits to be asked to dance. I’m happy showing anywhere to anyone. I have a museum show coming up in central India which I’m excited about. My wife is always happy if it’s somewhere warm. I have some ideas for very large works and in this case a hilltop is good. I like roundabouts and motorways.

 

If you could invite someone to dinner in your studio, who would it be, and what dish would you share?

No way would I like to do that. It’s a workspace and I’m busy.

Could you tell us about the exhibition coming up in April at De Brock Gallery?

I have shown at De Brock a fair few times now. Always a great pleasure. Knokke is a very particular place and I'm happy to have got to know it. I’m showing a group of paintings from a recent series that was a somewhat “back to basics” project. I had focused for over a year on two quite specific moving people groups of work. A project drawing small school children and another animating members of the British Sprint Olympic team. I wanted to get back to something very normal and I headed up to a local high street and spent two cold hours standing on a traffic island photographing the passers-by. Questioned by the police twice and initially feeling like it wasn't a very good catch I later realised I had a very rich collection of Londoners with some 30 drawings. With this palette of people, I was able to make a range of works of individuals and small crowds in different materials and on different scales. These works use a new technique that looks like silkscreen but is actually a high grade computer print on wood. The finish is mirror gloss, giving a slick commercial feel to the works that’s at odds with the somewhat grungy street normality of everyday high street shoppers. I set them in a neutral white space that echoes the white of the gallery wall so that when a row of these figures are hung, they are free to wander around the gallery space as if on a promenade - like the beach promenade outside the gallery windows. 

These days I usually do "one space one type of work" installations. It helps focus the mind and allow the combined works to build up a rhythm. The next space contains the first paintings on canvas I have ever done. Large, simple portraits. It’s a longer discussion to tell the whole story of these works but briefly. During a trip to India, I was taken with the wild colours of village houses and Hindu statues that seem to disregard any idea of description but rather acted as something more like coding. I am working on trying to train an Ai to draw my portraits (in the spirit of "if you can’t beat them") and this led me to jettison all but the most essential elements and keep the faces almost entirely symmetrical. Like the mad colours, this regularity seems to turn the individual portraits into something like symbols or logos. I wanted to produce them in a vivid but straightforward way that echoed the hand painted Indian village buildings and statues. I aimed for a quiet, almost silent way of presenting the faces and hand painting seemed like the answer. I asked all the staff of the Bangalore museum to stand against a wall and pose for me, and these are some of the results. I don’t paint them myself, too slow.

How important has your long history of exhibitions with De Brock Gallery been in your career?

As I said it’s always a pleasure to exhibit at De Brock Gallery. I work with 12 galleries around the world and these collaborations that usually result in a show every 4 to 5 years are the backbone of my process. Commissions and museum shows come and go and are great to bring things together and push scale and combinations, but commercial gallery shows are focused and allow me to finalise the various groups of works and ideas I am making at any one time. I like the fact that the galleries know me and my studio, my family and history, and I know the spaces and different approaches of the gallerists. It’s very productive. 

What is a question you wish people would ask you but never do? 

That’s a rather twisted question in itself. I’m not a great believer in talking about art or adding texts to pictures. I feel an artwork should speak for itself. The idea of the need for a translation or subtitles, frustrates me. If I write it's usually an attempt to demystify rather than explain. I get questions from school children online sometimes and my favourite was “do you have a pet?”. The answer is yes, three cats.