A lot of my work is like picking potatoes; you have to get into the rhythm of it. It is different than patience. It is not thinking. It is working with the rhythm.

I'm an artist living in a small, Scottish village. So one would expect to be treated with some sort of caution. And the village and the farmers have shown enormous tolerance of me and interest in what I do. I mean, they don't necessarily understand what I'm doing all the time. But they, you know, I think they respect what I do and that there is a connection between what they do with the land and what I do, you know, that we're both dependent on weather and respond to that.

If you've ever come across a tree that you've lived with for many years and then one day it's blown over, there's incredible shock and violence about that.

I'm very fortunate to be able to do what I do and live the way I do.

As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone.

Time confined into blind caves or extended through tunnels, responds to the call of infinity, which teases with its promise of freedom. outside the body, time is a pair of compasses in the hands of eternity, but inside it is a pendulum, fastened to the heart. the heart takes its measure from the lengthening swing of the pendulum surveying what time is left. in its own rhythm time spreads itself wildly here and there and is crippled elsewhere. its unequally distributed weight wounds my body - that is how the particularities of my life are manifest.

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.