0:09:07 Born in Hampstead, London, in 1950, the seventh of seven children; my mother is from Hamburg, Germany, and father, Irish-English; father grew up in Walsall in the West Midlands; I grew up in a very religious Catholic family who prayed together before going to bed; remember trooping off to church on Sunday and fainting regularly; we got a dispensation to have orange juice with sugar in it so we wouldn't faint; we would leave at seven in the morning for the earliest Mass and then come back for bacon and eggs; the rest of Sunday was free; I did not remain a Catholic but dropped it after leaving Ampleforth; think that the total answer to fundamental questions that Catholicism provides you with - why are we here? etc.; that kind of understanding of the human condition is not a bad thing to be given as a child, and when it collapses as intellectually unsustainable, you spend the rest of your life trying to find other foundations for meaning. That might explain my motivation; having lost my faith, from that point onwards I was searching and analysing my situation. I can remember coming here to Cambridge as a kind of opening of a door; there were other traditions and other ways of thinking about the world, and profoundly different genealogies of culture to be discovered; it was fantastic coming here and doing anthropology and later art history

4:29:16 In the first long vacation I went to India for the first time; the combination of learning in an intellectual way about alternative cultures and then going and experiencing first hand; in the second long vacation I went to Egypt, Syria, Southern Turkey, Lebanon, visiting ancient sites - Tyre and Sidon etc. - where there was a wonderful dialogue between the indigenous cultures and the classical world; losing of the Catholic faith and the beginning of looking at the world as an open book, happened at the same time

6:23:11 After leaving Cambridge I went to India; it took me a year to get there; I spent a long time in Syria which I loved, particularly Aleppo and Damascus, and spent a lot of time with artists there; then went to Baghdad, then north of Baghdad where I was arrested by the border guards on my way to see the leader of the Kurdish resistance; spent an uncomfortable ten days in the hands of the police being interrogated, ending up in a high-security prison in Baghdad; a very unpleasant experience; then went on into Iran, crossing from Basra, visiting Shiraz and Isfahan etc.; all of that took about five months and then I got stuck in Afghanistan for another five months because of the India-Pakistan war; having gone from the great madrassas of Southern Persia to Mashhad and then on to Herat where I spent some time, both in the mountains looking at the really wonderful sixteenth-century madrassas south of Herat, then south to Kandahar and Helmand Province, looking at the wonderful ruin where Alexander the Great kept his elephants south of Kandahar; in the Spring crossed the Salang pass and up into Mazari Sharif; I crossed the steppes as far as the border on the road to Samarkand; so had a lot of adventures on the way to India; there, spent a week at the Golden Temple in Amritsar where I met some Tibetans who invited me to Dalhousie, an old British hill station; I took a strange half tumbledown mock-Tudor house there; heard about a Buddhist meditation course being taught by S.N. Goenka, a Burmese national; I had heard that he was a great teacher and that was the beginning of my involvement; it was perhaps the most important thing that happened to me in my life; having had a relatively classical education, suddenly being given a technique by which one can develop mindfulness and become aware of being itself as a subject of attention - a remarkable tool, a remarkable gift; I ended up doing ten ten-day courses over the next two years with Goenka, staying in a variety of monasteries; I was attached to a monastery in Sonada which was Tibetan Kagyu and took teachings from Kalu Rinpoche, the Abbot of the monastery

11:22:22 Essentially my practise is Hinayana, awareness of being with very close attention to the body as a space of exploration, which through persistent mindfulness becomes an open, porous space; that realization, and with it the philosophy of Buddhism which is not really a religion; not about worship but trying to deal with the mind-body problem in the most direct way possible - the idea that you can make a conscious effort to use your body both as a space station but also as a form of laboratory, a place of experimentation and analysis - through that process to peel away the things that, through ignorance, attach you to the idea that you possess anything, particularly that whichthatwhich we for convenience-sake call 'my body'; it is on temporary loan from systems that we barely understand - carbon life-forms that have been built up over millions of years; it is a strange thing because within all of us we have this capability though language and the symbolic ordering of experience cannot convey it; through Buddhism I was introduced to another way of learning that was maybe less to do with articulation or translation of experience into forms of symbolic exchange; the development of my sculpture is an attempt to make physical, to think and feel in a physical way, that is exactly parallel to what I learned in meditation; the work comes out of mindfulness of a moment of being; this is a real body in real time which is captured in space; it is not a representation or a perfect copy, but an index; Peirce's categories are very useful for this, a symbol, an image and an index; I am not interested in symbolic language or a perfect copy; I am interested in the index because it has to do with evidence, with touching reality; indices happen naturally - the shadow is an index, the imprint of your thumb etc.; I try to use the idea of an actual impression of a moment of being as the basis of my work; most of my work is a moment of intense concentration on being which is then captured by a process of moulding; that idea of a foundation in fact with the implication that, though it is of a particular body it could be, through empathy, anybody; if we transfer our expectations of what a statue is from the idea that this is not a symbolic or idealized memorial of a particular person, but is simply a displacement of space that happens to have human characteristics; then this is the body not as an object but as a place and this form that I use in my work suddenly becomes more open; because of our dialectical thinking and the development of Western art, we have the absolute division between the figurative and abstract forms of expression but I think there is something called the abstract body, and that is what I am trying to make; in some sense that has been a lost subject in Western iconography; Gombrich said that in some way the process of Western art has been about successive models in which visual perception can be conveyed and carried; a narrative purpose in art that either celebrates religious or political, historical, truths; the idea of making a believable representation of the way things look, which goes right through to impressionism, but with the arrival of photography that whole trajectory is seen as a very partial and particular story; when you look at other traditions and see the persistence of the need to make an equivalent to the human body within art, the abstract body occurs the whole time, in Oceanic art, pre-classical Mediterranean, but perhaps most potently in the art of Asia; if you see the development from early Gupta onwards you find what I am talking about; this is not about the body in action or the frozen moment in a narrative story, this is about body as a site of being; it is not the body illustrating an action, but about making the space of an image into some kind of focus for life; there is embodied in it an understanding of the limitation of what sculpture is about: that it is silent and still, that it exists in time in a different register to biological time; in some sense it is through the stillness and silence of sculpture that we as living, feeling, conscious beings can sense our own being in time and space through the agency of the work; the idea of agency, that art is not simply about the virtuous representation or privileged or powerful people, but that the space of art can be used for everybody to sense their own lives in a different register; this has become very important to me so that in the development of my work, that reference to an alternative tradition but recognises the subject that was lost after Modernism, that was never present in the academic tradition of dealing with the figure; Modernism denied the body; from Cubism onwards, was that art became increasingly concerned with its inner formal syntax, and more and more separated from life, more institutionalized; it is a curious thing culturally that for most of us when we think about art we think about the museum; that would not have been true a hundred years ago; the institutionalization of art is one of the tragedies of our time; we need to reintegrate the space of art into our lives at the dimension of reverie or dream, or simply in the idea of an alternative space through which the world of work can be countered by something else; for me, looking at pre-literate societies, or examples in human history where the artist has not been as a specialist, separated from common life, and to re-examine, using an anthropological model, what people find necessary –finding inspiration in dance, clothes, story telling , music another more integrated model in which art becomes again common; that is what energises me most at the moment; how can we reintegrate the space of art into daily life, and stop it from being an institutionalized object and allow it to become a place of participation, where the working man or woman can go in order to see their own lives from another perspective

26:20:22 For me now, the two most important project - one just happened, and the other in the process of happening; 'Clay and the collective body' which was a real attempt to engage everybody in the idea that they are the makers of the future; a hundred tons of clay placed inside a pneumatic translucent building 36 metres square and 15 metres high; we exposed the cube for four days and then allowed sixty people at a time with the commitment that they would spend four hours in relation to this material; the atmosphere was 95o humidity, 23o of heat while the outside was 0o humidity and -minus15o; in this environment was a primal engagement with this material which invited touch; it was a regressive environment with no windows so could not see the outside and there was an airlock door; once you had passed through the door you were committed to what was happening within; cameras or mobile phones were not allowed; people said to me afterwards that they had not done such a thing since being a child; as had never been given this opportunity; this arising of culture, where people were making, maybe for the first time, simple objects; they could work anywhere, taking clay from the cube and making an alternative world somewhere else; what arose was this non-verbal communication in which often we were led by the children - the youngest was six; the children had no problem; don't know what happens between the age of six and twelve but young children draw and create naturally; the fear that people felt on first coming into the hall was swiftly transmuted to a delight, seeing evidence of what others had done; interestingly, some people who were nervous continued the work that someone else had left; what happened with this project was that by the end of it fifteen hundred people had worked together, often completing and extending things that had been left by others, and the cube was almost completely gone and the entire space filled with thousands of objects of all scales and kinds - complex models of landscapes with villages and seas, graveyards and olive groves, to disembodied body parts, an extreme menagerie of biological forms some of which were fantasy and some very well observed; what was extraordinary was how dialogues would happen; there were neighbourhoods of connectivity; what was beautiful was that there was no criteria but was a self-regulating process in which people never worried about where the art was, is that the question?does it matter? what it was was simply an open space in which those dialectics of producer and consumer or the viewer and the viewed collapsed; the first thing people noticed was the huge, luminous space; the second thing was the smell, the warmth, and the myriad of forms that looked like a coral reef by the end; it was as if they were absorbing and then contributing to something that already existed; that was the strangeness - adults being invited to play, to be in a different way; the sharing of the common ground suddenly released people from expectations or the kind of identities that they had held themselves within previously; for me it was an inspirational event; there was no product but the beauty of the process, what people gained from the experience and each other; the work was simply swept up and sent to a garden centre as the brick factory that gave the clay in the first place did not want it back; this work exists in memory, in some photographic evidence, but I like the idea of simply thinking of art as a space, of potential, where the viewer is in some sense also the viewed, not simply a passive consumer of a product of others, and the possibility of transformation, of another form of communicating, which is not to do with symbolic language; one example of an attempt to reintegrate art as a way of being within daily life

37:12:14 My fourth plinth project is opening on 6th July, in which I am inviting people to occupy the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square; plinth made in the nineteenth century for William IV the son of George IV, but nobody liked him enough to actually make the equestrian statue and it has remained empty ever since; I am inviting the inhabitants of the UK to occupy it, one person at a time for one hour at a time, twenty-four hours a day for a hundred days; it is a very simple idea to use the frame, the space of idealization of art, as an exercise in representation, saying, because of our civic history certain people have been chosen as representatives of collective memory - certainly in Trafalgar Square they are all military or regal; it proposes that every citizen is in some sense the repository of collective memory; the question that the project asks is what happens when you get real life to occupy the space of idealized statue; you get something very akin to a performance, to Speakers' Corner; I like that aspect of the project to celebrate the continuing of a long tradition here of freedom of speech, of self-expression; you also get something else which is from the other side of the spectacle; what does it mean for the subject, for the person experiencing this hour to be that isolated and removed from the common ground, what do they learn about themselves; the project is called 'One and Other' and it is an enquiry into representation as much as it is a democratization of the notion of the plinth and everything that it supposes, that this is a special person; when a housewife from Pinner stands there clutching her Tesco bag, eight metres from the ground, unprotected, at four o'clock in the morning, it's raining, that act of standing becomes a very different thing; what somebody might learn from that experience is for me the heart of the project and will constitute the most valuable part of the record; we will make an archive which will be kept by the National Portrait Gallery and maybe by one or two other institutions; I think of this work as an opportunity to take the temperature of the UK, and maybe we will learn something about ourselves - what we fear, hope, find funny, care about, enjoy doing; there is a wealth of talent out there and I am sure there will be extraordinary acts - juggling etc. - but also show the diversity of Britain now; I banned mobile phones from 'Clay and the collective body' because that was a uterine space and it was very important to leave the real world behind; with this there will be five fixed cameras and probably people will want to use their mobile phones to take account of the world around them and send it to their YouTube friends, and I think that's OK

43:56:02 The interesting thing about sculpture is that it is always a shared job, whether it is somebody like Epstein getting someone to do the roughing out on Adam or Michael Angelo doing the same; for me, the studio now has become, in a sense, a human instrument keeping everyone fully focused on what they are doing and allowing the work to arise; the idea that somehow one is ever in control is an illusion; the arising of an object has to do with the exercise of will, a very good plan, but what makes things interesting and gives them energy is the fact that you are responding the whole time to the thing that is trying to tell you something as it is formed; that is about the acute discipline between discipline and desire; it can exist within me as an artist but it can also exist in others; certainly for me the joy as well as the challenge now is that I have gathered around me a group of people who I trust implicitly who have become, in a sense, my family, with whom I can hardly think of living without; there are very simple and basic rules for the studio; if you can think or feel that something can be done better and you don't do it, you betray the work, yourself, and in a way the calling of art which is always to go further if you can; I think of this as an unfolding; the language that we are evolving is allowing us to express or touch things that were not touchable before; there is a level of research as well as a level of production, but the two are always in tension; we never want to make something simply for the sake of making it, but it is the next step from something that is already made; the work is itself the greatest master; I used to think that I made the work but now I think that the work is making us; it is very demanding and I can't actually fulfil all the requirements and imperatives that the work is imposing on us; if you believe in paying attention to what is happening as you make, and if the making is a dimension of thinking then the implications are rhizomic, and I need my friends; we are not running a production shop, we are running a research institute - or something between it and a kindergarten, kitchen or institution for the mentally disturbed - it is a mixture of a lot of different things; I am just delighted and privileged to work in the way that I do and that my work has become a collective enterprise; like any other exploration you need all those different sensibilities so it is more likely that you will respond in a responsible way to what is arising; I sometimes think that the greatest thing is actually the studio and what we do together; it is an open-ended research endeavour that uses physical thinking as its form; the notion that I think counter-productive to true creativity, that there is an unique, individual genius, and only through his magic and shamanic touch can he transform dross into something of value - I want everyone who works with me to fly, to feel identified in the work; they are not making the work for somebody else but making the work for the work; the work has absolute demands and is about the interface between the knowable and the ineffable, and we are always testing the edge between what might be imagined and what might be realized; the idea that it is a lonely adventure is a romantic fiction; I think you have to be prepared to plan ahead, and all the things that you would have to do in any other responsible project; I feel that I am more in contact, but the work isn't mine any more than my body is mine; people will continue to accuse me of narcissism, and they may be right, but the issue for me is to deal with what is arising and to do it in the most effective way possible; for me at the moment working with a team of twenty or so seems pretty effective

55:40:08 The inauguration of 'Plant' (2002) at the McDonald Institute in Cambridge. Graeme Barker introduces both Colin Renfrew and Antony Gormley.