The current work continues with the same concern that it has always had; that is an interest in archetypes, the archetypes of two opposing aspects of our culture. There have been changes with materials and approaches but there is a central core that remains the same; on the one hand there is art as the sublime, art as poetry, and on the other the banal which seems to me to work in an inverse way. The crudity of the obviously banal is incredibly powerful. I remember a friend's brother who couldn't read very well, and he read a cowboy thriller, the first book he'd ever read of his own volition. He was over the moon about it. . .people shooting each other all over the place. . .he'd never realised that all these words could change into such strong images. Looking at similar incidents they've often struck me as sublime in a very odd way, in a perverse way, perverse because so obviously banal. The key to it is the way artifacts seem to work in time. Works of art seem to function in a very slow way, remaining the same but getting richer and more powerful. The banal products of mass culture have an immense impact straight away, but as they get older they simply degenerate into antiques.

I can identify three major shifts in the work. The first was at college when I realised that I somehow had to confront mass culture and kitsch. I did this by replicating its mechanisms and trying to restrict the context. The next move began in 1978 and culminated in the work shown at the ICA in 1981, of which Ideal Standard Forms was more than a year's work in itself. It was this piece that made me realise that I could bring these archetypes into physical reality, my reality. The other shift was with The Fruit of Oblivion made in 1982.

This cornucopia with grapes was one of those wonderful sidesteps that sometimes happen, a synthesis of the two elements that concern me. It brought in mass culture simply as materials and colour; yet was also an archetypal image that could substitute for the figure. It made an immense amount of sense to me,

As I collect images, or rather as they accumulate, some small feature or detail will become more and more apparent. To the point where I feel irritated by it and the only way to resolve it is to use it. At the moment I'm very concerned with decoration, architectural decoration. There is this solid flame image for instance which is very, very curious. Sometimes these images occur because I don't have a very clear waking up period and dreams will linger over, hang on into daytime and become entangled with the physical activity of dealing with the work.