I go way beyond just the wood and stone but to the process of growth and farming and the tensions between the two.

Looking, touching, material, place and form are all inseparable from the resulting work. It is difficult to say where one stops and another begins. The energy and space around a material are as important as the energy and space within. The weather--rain, sun, snow, hail, mist, calm--is that external space made visible. When I touch a rock, I am touching and working the space around it. It is not independent of its surroundings, and the way it sits tells how it came to be there.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.

The process of growth is obviously critical to my understanding of the land and myself. So the process is far more unpredictable with far more compromises with the day, the weather, the material.

The main source of my income is through the commissions of the large-scale works and big sculptures, the projects.

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.

If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different.