I think people perceive my creatures as absurd because they look different, but at the same time, they are a little bit familiar. I want people to feel a kind of empathy with them. When you think about it, all nature is kind of strange looking.. in fact, I'm a strange a looking creature.
My practice is focused on bodies and relationships; the relationships between people and other creatures, between people and our bodies, between creatures and the environment, between the artificial and the natural.
Artists make worlds for people to walk through.
The illusion of life is crucial for the work, otherwise the ideas wouldn't be able to jump across, people wouldn't engage with it.
Most of the work I make uses materials that are a bit outside of the traditional fine art world.
How does contemporary technology and culture changes our understanding of what it means to be human. What is our relationship with - and responsibilities towards - that which we create.
I work with whatever mediums seems best suited to evoking the sorts of thoughts and emotions I am interested in playing with.
I don't want the ideas to be limited by what I can physically do. The ideas come first.
I am particularly interested in the way that the everyday realities of the world around us change these relations.
As we get older, our world gets smaller and we start to doubt and question. We are really suspicious of difference.
Perhaps because of this, many have looked at my practice in terms of science and technology, however, for me it is just as informed by Surrealism and mythology.
In the studio we use a pretty wide range of materials for the sculptures; silicone, fibreglass, human and animal hair, ABS plastic, dental acrylic, traditional and high-tech plasters, stainless steel, automotive paint, plywood, Britannia metal, found objects and taxidermy animals.
Ideas rather than methods are central to they way I work, although drawing plays a central generative role in everything I do.
I don't set out to make something that is repulsive and that would scare people. I know that some people don't like what I make, and don't find it cute, but that's hard for me to understand.
It's interesting to work with what's important today, which is meaningful for our everyday lives.
Thinking is a social process. I talk to everyone from children to anthropologists and philosophers. I try my ideas out on people and they talk back to you. That's how ideas get formed.
I certainly don't see the humour in my work as something that detracts from its seriousness. It's just a way of making difficult messages more palatable.
The idea that we can have a new life form, what does it say about the zoo's main purpose, which is to preserve life? What does it say when the artificial and real animal can have the same attraction to people?
In one hundred years time people will look back and think 'these people were really worried about the environment, they were looking at things to do with global warming, and this is why they were making work about these issues'.
I struggle in life to find a sense of joy in things.
I would say my work is anti-ironic.
I feel that there's hardly any irony in my work; if there's anything, there'll be sincerity, which people sometimes find hard to deal with.
I usually have several things on the go. Whether it is my own drawings for the next work that I am working on while a sculpture is being fabricated or several works at different points in production.
Materials are very important to me, and always have been.
I started thinking of digital imaging, not photography, in 1994 as it seemed the most appropriate way to deal with ideas of biotechnology and advertising. My practice is conceptual.
