Casting Director

Artist Marc Quinn talks to Michael Squire about his latest work, Drawn From Life – a series of 12 sculptures installed in Sir John Soane’s Museum, – and reveals what it is about Classical art that has influenced his work.

One aspect that defines your work is its knowing and reflective response to Greek and Roman sculpture. What is it about Classical art that intrigues you?

The Classical is an open and rich category. For me, Classical sculpture is in a way the origin of figurative sculpture – it has given us the sculptural language that we know. But what is interesting about Classical sculpture is that it’s really about the past, about time. Because so many of the sculptures are damaged – they’re incomplete, with bits broken off them – they speak of a kind of loss. They make us think of a lost era – one that we can imagine as perhaps more perfect than our own. I think that’s why people so like the idea of ‘Classical antiquity’, because there’s a sense of a lost golden age, yet one that is somehow still with us.

That theme of ‘fragmentation’ takes us to your current show, Drawn from Life – a series of statues, All About Love, installed in Sir John Soane’s Museum. Could you describe them to us?

The 12 sculptures are made from fibreglass – but also made from life: they’re life-casts of myself and my Muse, Jenny Bastet . Each sculpture is cast in two parts, the first comprising the legs, the second the upper body. The legs are Jenny’s alone. But with the torsos, Jenny and I are holding each other . So, my arms, and only my arms, are in the sculpture, combined with Jenny’s torso.

As a result, the arms appear to be disembodied or floating, rather like the parts of a broken sculpture (where the body itself has been snapped off, and you are just left with the arms interacting with another sculpture). The combination creates a mystery – a kind of absence.