 Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures. |
| Winter makes a bridge between one year and another and, in this case, one century and the next. |
| I'm cautious about using fire. It can become theatrical. I am interested in the heat, not the flames. |
| The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone. |
| I have walked around the same streets so many times, and then seen a place that had been hidden to me. I now know the sites in a way that makes me think I could have made better use of the connections between place and snowball. |
| I soon realised that what had happened on a small scale cannot necessarily be repeated on a larger scale. The stones were so big that the amount of heat required was prohibitively expensive and wasteful. |
| It's frightening and unnerving to watch a stone melt. |
| A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels. |
| Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned. |
| The stones tear like flesh, rather than breaking. Although what happens is violent, it is a violence that is in stone. A tear is more unnerving than a break. |
| Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There's something very powerful about finding snow in summer. |
| Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch. |
| The difference between a theatre with and without an audience is enormous. There is a palpable, critical energy created by the presence of the audience. |
| Fire is the origin of stone.By working the stone with heat, I am returning it to its source. |
| Three or four stones in one firing will all react differently. I try to achieve a balance between those that haven't progressed enough and those about to go too far. |
| People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city. |
| It takes between three and six hours to make each snowball, depending on snow quality. Wet snow is quick to work with but also quick to thaw, which can lead to a tense journey to the cold store. |
| As with all my work, whether it's a leaf on a rock or ice on a rock, I'm trying to get beneath the surface appearance of things. Working the surface of a stone is an attempt to understand the internal energy of the stone. |
| The first stone was just tried in the spirit of experimentation. The opening of the stone was far more interesting than the drawing that I had done on it. |
| The reason why the stone is red is its iron content, which is also why our blood is red. |
