2010. Pink Portuguese marble. 45 x 31 x 17 cm.

I like to use materials not so much as a medium, but more as a physical fact, poetically entangled with historical, political, and other associations. Working with marble in Pietrasanta, one is surrounded by the skills, traditions and examples of neoclassicism – heroic, dramatic, illusionistic. Yet this metamorphosis of the body into stone betrays a fundamental unease, a fear of the body’s messiness and complexity, which provided the context for my work. I have sampled or isolated elements of neoclassical style, unsettling yet strangely familiar, in the service of what I consider a blackly comic form of existentialism.