Berlin seems like a place of healing to me though: you have both the Holocaust Memorial and Hiroshima Strasse side-by-side there. You have the whole last century libraried and you can see exactly what we did. Now there's lots of artists and musicians moving there because they can't afford the rent in London and New York, and they're having children and making it a gentle place. It seems to be a place of hope now.

...but when The Spirit speaks,—or beauty from the sky Descends into my being,—when I hear The storm-hymns of the mighty ocean roll, Or thunder sound,—the champion of the storm!— Then I feel envy for immortal words, The rush of living thought; oh! then I long To dash my feelings into deathless verse, That may administer to unborn time, And tell some lofty soul how I have lived A worshipper of Nature and of Thee!

The people you love become ghosts inside of you, and like this you keep them alive.

I'm not avoiding your question on my relationship to the fashion world or my work being shown in a fashion setting. My work's most often seen in the streets on billboards. I don't know if it being seen in a shop is any much different.

Obviously my own work comes from a conceptual art tradition, but I love the graffiti artists, and I feel spiritually closer to them than to most contemporary art; they make the city a free space of diverse voices and we shouldn't get all cynical about them just because Banksy made some money. I collaborate sometimes with Krae, who is an old school east London graffiti writer.

The flood will lift the ghosts from the Hollywood lawn cemetery and they will disappear like ether in the now dead air. All the names will be erased from the billboards and the theatres and the piers and the magazines and the monuments. You live by myths of immortality, and your myths are not safe.

And Thou, vast Ocean! on whose awful face Time’s iron feet can print no ruin-trace, By breezes lull’d, or by the storm-blasts driv’n, Thy majesty uplifts the mind to heaven.