Do you still collect found objects? I remember how, in one of your talks you mention that you found a dream diary and you joked that you might make a call one day, saying ‘I have your dream diary!’ and that this would be the ultimate menacing call that somebody could receive. Do you still collect all those?

Well, no actually. I had a friend who I was at school with, who worked as the manager of a charity shop in London and he knew that I collected this stuff and would gather it for me. He would send me a big parcel, every few months, of all the stuff that he had found – and then he stopped working there, so it stopped arriving. But I have an archive of probably thousands of pieces of crap that he collected over the years, that I don’t really know what to do with anymore.

I’m not really a collector – think the dream diary thing would be an interesting idea for a movie script or a novel. 

I’m sort of separated from my record collection. In Glasgow, I had friends who ran a record shop and I used to buy a lot of records from them, but I realised that I used to do it just to help them, really – because I wanted to support the shop – and I would play the records once and never listen to them again. So, now I listen to Spotify and I don’t really care... I’m not really interested in ‘stuff ’. I’m interested in making things, but I’m not really interested in collecting or acquiring things. I’ve been making guitars recently – this is my latest guitar! It’s got one knob... this is the only interesting item in my studio, apart from the artwork, obviously.

I’m not a collector: I feel like it’s a weakness, in a way. I get asked to do a lot of media stuff, and it’s often a question people pose, ‘Do you collect things?’ I and I sort of say, ‘No, I never really did’. I collect pebbles from the beach sometimes – I live near a beach. You get pebbles with holes in. The area where I live is called the Jurassic Coast, from the period of prehistory with dinosaurs and stuff, so there are a lot of fossils that you can find on the beach – not that I’ve actually found any. The only ones
I’m interested in are the stones with holes in, so I collect those. People do go back there and I call them ‘holers’ – that’s a name I’ve invented. In our living room area there’s just a big pile of pebbles that me and my wife have collected. In a way, it’s like the things that the dog collects – the dog collects tennis balls and we collect stones.

Narrative is really essential in your work. What do you think of the narratives that have been created by new technology?

In terms of people communicating in emojis and things? I think it’s interesting – language is an interesting thing to talk about, to think about how you interact with technology and communicate. Communication is a very interesting thing – I was reading about a linguist, who was saying that emojis constitute a language in themselves. In a way, that’s like a PhD subject – interesting to talk about once. I’m in my fifties now, so when I was a student, there were no mobile phones, there were no computers, no smartphones. The mobile phone didn’t arrive in my life until I was in my thirties and the smartphone has only been around for maybe ten or fifteen years. I think it stems from the experience of being texted all the time and having to have a response to that text... and then there’s WhatsApp and you have to have a response to that… Emojis, for me, are a form of abbreviation. They’re also a form of having to deal with correspondence that you don’t want to deal with. So, people ask you things, the answer to which you don’t want to reveal – so you just send ‘clownface’ or something. The world really changes without us noticing – we adapt to the Pandemic, to Zoom conversations... a year ago, we weren’t doing that. Suddenly this is normal, suddenly this is the way of doing interviews. It’s actually quite a nice way of doing interviews, in a way, because it’s somehow more intimate and easier to prepare for. You don’t mind spending so long doing it, because you can be having a shower and, two minutes later, be doing the Zoom interview – which is not the case in the real world.
I have a notebook for meetings where I just do doodles. They’re maybe not very typical – no words, only abstract. This is a good conversation, because I haven’t really got very far with the art – that’s a good testament to my interest in the conversation!

So how do you keep sane? Are there any daily rituals?

Well, that presupposes that I am sane, I suppose – which one can never know… [laughs] until it all goes very wrong! I think art is very helpful, though and having a structure is too. I’m certainly doing things that I didn’t used to do. I’ve tried to be a bit healthier during lockdown, so I’ve been getting a lot more exercise and trying to do a little bit of dieting, to try and keep my weight down, walking the dog, trying to drink less alcohol. So, I have a routine – during the week, I’m very healthy... and then it gets to Friday and I can have a glass of wine... maybe without going for a long walk in the morning. So, yes, my week is quite structured – but I quite like that anyway. I’ve realised I’m quite an introvert, so it doesn’t bother me too much to be at home, just writing in quite a solitary place. But, obviously, I have a partner – I’m married and I have a pet, so I’m not lonely. Also, because I live in the countryside, there are only 200 people who live in our village, so everybody knows everybody and you still kind of interact with people a bit. Obviously, at the moment we don’t go out to people’s houses, nobody goes out of the village – nobody goes anywhere. So, we’re not quite so paranoid about catching the virus. You can go for a walk and stuff, over to somebody’s garden, to have a chat with them. We’re not that isolated, but you sometimes are in the city – if you live in an apartment, it’s much more difficult. When we were in Brighton, for example, it felt a little bit more stressful, because there were more people.