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

A child came up to me and asked 'am I dreaming?' I had a similar experience coming to the Art Gallery of South Australia when I was a child. My mum had done a workshop here and it stayed with me. It's an important formative time.

The idea that we can have a new life form, what does it say about the zoo's main purpose, which is to preserve life? What does it say when the artificial and real animal can have the same attraction to people?

We always use resin instead of polyurethane, even though it takes more work and is in places where it can't be seen, because resin tends to be more UV stable than urethane.

The silicone we use is the hardest, most UV stable we can get, and we have done enormous amounts of testing and research to get a paint solution that is extremely hardy and repairable.

I pretty much keep everything; we have drawers full of samples and tests and every old catalogue and magazine.

In one hundred years time people will look back and think 'these people were really worried about the environment, they were looking at things to do with global warming, and this is why they were making work about these issues'.