People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city.

Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured.

I am not a performer but occasionally I deliberately work in a public context. Some sculptures need the movement of people around them to work.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

Nature, for me is raw and dangerous and difficult and beautiful and unnerving.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.

I'm not a performer, in that I don't like the public, but I work in that respect.