Marc Quinn interview (2000)
Mark Quinn interview: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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Marc Quinn. Helen Smith, (2000). Marble, 90 x 70 x 62 in.
R. J. Preece: Do you prefer to use certain materials over others at this point?
Marc Quinn: I use whatever material it takes to make the idea be realized. It depends on how things happen. For the marble sculptures, they had to be made in marble, not plastic or plaster. I like to use materials for their intrinsic and metaphoric content as well. These sculptures use material in a traditional way— I guess that’s why people used marble, because you can get this amazing luminousness. You use that to turn the thing inside out, to make a new form of expression, really.
R. J. Preece: Which materials are more difficult to work with?
Marc Quinn: The ice sculpture, Love is all around you (1999), is literally simple, but first you have to make the sculpture, make a mold, and then it takes two and a half weeks to freeze. Every day you have to drill holes into the middle to let the pressure out. It then weighs 600 kilograms, and you have to move it into the gallery from cold storage, keeping it frozen, and take the mold off it. At any point, the piece can break and you never know if you’ll get a good result until you get it. So, it’s necessarily nerve-wrecking.
R. J. Preece: You say it takes two and a half weeks—how did you find that out?
Marc Quinn: Trial and error. I just started to freeze it, and that’s how it worked out. But these sculptures disappear and that’s the idea of it.
R. J. Preece: So Love is all around you eventually melts away?
Marc Quinn: It doesn’t melt, it evaporates. Basically when you freeze-dry it, the sculpture evaporates. The water vapor moves invisibly from the sculpture to the cooling element in the refrigeration system, and it then gets defrosted and goes out into the gallery space. When you are viewing Love is all around you in the gallery, you are breathing in the artwork. You are literally taking it into your body, and it becomes you. So there’s a physical relationship between the sculpture and the viewer.
R. J. Preece: In addition to ice, you’ve used your own blood and excrement as materials. Are you comfortable working with them? Are you so used to them that they’re just materials?
Marc Quinn: You have a different relationship to your own personal material than you do to other people’s. When you go to the bathroom, you’re not horrified and shocked. But if you walked in and found someone one else had just been, you probably would be. Your own relationship to these things is slightly different. It’s not like I’m making it with other people’s.
Mark Quinn interview: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
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