The first snowball I froze was put in my mother's deep freeze when I was in my early 20s.

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.

The things that I make are that which a person will make. They're not meant to mimic nature. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person.

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

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.

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.

When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.