In the studio we spend a lot of time working our what materials will work best and also last. We do tests and come back to them years later to see how they are still performing, and this leads our decisions.

I feel that there's hardly any irony in my work; if there's anything, there'll be sincerity, which people sometimes find hard to deal with.

I don't set out to make something that is repulsive and that would scare people. I know that some people don't like what I make, and don't find it cute, but that's hard for me to understand.

I finished VCA at the height of the last big recession in the early 90s, and seeing that I was not going to be able to join one of the dwindling number of commercial galleries, I started an ARI called the Basement Project which ran for three years. Things came a little at a time and all of a sudden it's 20 years later and I'm still making art, which is really all I ever wanted to do.

Materials are very important to me, and always have been.

Quality and longevity are the primary criteria, along with repairability and ease of production.

Thinking is a social process. I talk to everyone from children to anthropologists and philosophers. I try my ideas out on people and they talk back to you. That's how ideas get formed.