Julian Opie discusses his new sculptures installed in London as part of Sculpture in the City.

I started making portraits some twenty years ago, and went through a number of iterations – films, sculptures, paintings – and at a certain point, I felt I had done all that I could do and left it for five or odd years. Recently, I found new interest and a slightly new approach to making portraits. They’re similar to my earlier works but a lot more symmetrical and pared down – this allows me to do some different things with them. I’ve gathered together here, for Sculpture in the City, four people that seem to cover a fair amount of the different possibilities within drawing; one has glasses, one has blonde hair, one has a full beard, another has a moustache and short hair, and that all gives it a bit of range instead of just two women and two men. In this recent group of works that I collectively call ‘Everyone’, the idea is, perhaps, to suggest that this new system of drawing could be used endlessly and describe anyone – that everyone could have this ‘logo’ of themselves and that the system could take that on board without having to make too many changes to the basic structure. It’s a bit like facial recognition, perhaps; a general set of rules can be applied since faces follow a fairly regular pattern. What I tend to do when I’m drawing a new person is that I take a previous drawing I’ve done of a face, put that on top of the new photograph, and simply move the elements around until I’ve got the new face – often, of course, adding certain elements and removing others. The sculptures here are made of concrete with a metal frame within them, and that allows me to build on quite a large scale. The effect is perhaps quite brutal, but I feel that the contrast with the personal element of ‘somebody’, an individual, sets off the brutality of the large, concrete, crash-barrier style object. Having them out here is a perfect solution for me, because it’s right in the middle of the city, out in the public space where such an object seems to be at home, but also where there are crowds of people walking past – each with their own faces that could be used in a similar way.

I never feel like an artwork actually exists until it’s made and put out into the world. A drawing or a plan is just that; it’s not a finished piece of work. The placement and the way it can exist in a surrounding is very much part of the creating and the understanding of that object. Placing something in a museum or a gallery is quite a particular thing. They’re public buildings but they’re sometimes quite quiet or empty, so the work that you put in there has a way of being read that already surrounds it. What’s great about putting something out in the street or in a public environment is that there are no preconceptions surrounding it  – the work could be a piece of equipment, it could be an accident, it could be an artwork, it could be an advert. The possible meanings are much more open and flexible. I find that freedom exciting. There’s also obviously an element of scale that becomes possible when you’re outside. In fact, scale is all the more important. Something indoors can find its own scale and it can also be small and function in a very powerful fashion, but once you’re outdoors, you’re up against a different kind of scale and environment. That allows me to sometimes go very large, in this case it’s not super large but there are four sculptures. I also recognise that having works out in the public realm requires a certain approach and, perhaps, responsibility. You don't want to bug people like a loud radio on a beach, you don't want to spoil a calm or beautiful environment with an artwork stuck in the middle of a beautiful view out to the sea, that doesn't seem fair or right. I tend to be happy picking a fairly harsh or urban environment, or perhaps a space that's not being used, not particularly notable or wanted, and inhabiting that. The language of the materials and the reference of the works bounces off the surrounding environment. Here in the city, you’ve got a lot of glass, aluminium, concrete, busy crowds and traffic. I definitely thought about that in terms of choosing what work might function in that space.

I’ve drawn various groups of people recently. The project started when I was doing a series of exhibitions in China, and I was asked to come up with an idea for a large lobby space. At the time, I was having a formal dinner with a lot of the organisers and artists of that museum, and the two things seemed to somehow combine. I looked around the table, seeing all these very different kinds of faces and thought about the lobby and how I could make some work there. I asked everybody at the dinner if they would allow me to take their photograph. I then went away and did drawings of all the people there, including the waiters. Having done that, and after finding this new way of drawing faces, I set about drawing a variety of different groups; all the people that came to the studio for a while, as well as family and friends. I was doing a project for a school at the time, and I drew portraits of some twenty-odd children. I was also working on a project with the British Olympic running team and asked them if, whilst I was doing other things like filming them running, I could make their portraits too. So I had these different groups of portraits. For Sculptures in the City, I've picked people from a variety of those groups. There’s a couple of people from my gallery in Korea that I was working on a show with at the time, there’s my daughter, Elena, and there's one of the members of the British Olympic sprinting team. To take their photograph, the process is that I stand a couple of metres away to avoid distortion, and then I zoom in on the face. I ask people to make no attempt to communicate; no smiling or making any kind of expression – fairly flat lighting and surroundings. I try to take the photo directly in front of the face so they're not looking up, down or sideways. I take that photograph, as I said before, and put that underneath a previously made drawing and adjust the lines in order to fit the new face. I send that final drawing to a concrete factory which, in this case is in London, and that's made into a mould – a negative form – with the portrait on both the front and the back, and a metal structure is placed inside. The concrete is then poured inside the mould and left to dry for some six weeks, and then it’s complete.