Mapping the Future

What was the first piece of art you made?

I started off as a landscape painter in Wales. I did that for about four years, but when I came to London that suddenly seemed a bit inappropriate. But in a way what followed was the same approach. I was looking at the urban landscape and wondering how it was made, and how it was used. I see that as akin to using paint and investigating how organic forms and light are produced.

In fact, I do still go back to painting landscapes sometimes, although I haven't had the chance recently. It's very much like going home for Christmas - when I've lost track of what I'm doing, I can go back, remind myself how I started and re-live the whole succession of events. Inevitably, I get bored with it after three or four days, but it puts me back on track. Just like going home, it's a really nice idea but soon you remember why you left.

So you homed in on the use of water.

Well a lot of the early paintings and drawings were involved with water. When I began to make objects, I was never happy with their context - whether they were on plinths or on the floor, it never seemed to work. I was absolutely wild about documentation, and it dawned on me that the objects worked much better in photograph. Perhaps that was the connection into making installation.

You were trained as an architectural draughtsman.

I worked in architecture and archeology, and dramatically rejected all that to go to art college. There didn't seem to be any creativity in architecture, or any room to manoeuvre. But it's interesting that those influences are now resurfacing quite blatantly, especially in the drawings.

None of the objects in the drawings are biodegradable. Norman Mailer has an obsession with plastics. He was saying recently that plastic is the embodiment of man's vanity. It demands so much of the earth's resources for so little.

Part if the idea in the archaeological drawings is that the source objects will be dug up, once this building and all of us have vanished. They will be cherished, and they'll be drawn by someone similar to me. In the job I used to do, I was drawing the Roman equivalent of Coke cans, shards of terracotta rubbish. Making these drawings now is by-passing hundreds of years. The important time to look at them is now. I should say that the objects I draw are chosen as much for their aesthetic qualities as for any debate about usage and disposability - they are incredibly beautiful as well. Some of these objects have incredibly classical proportions.

The first set of drawings were of Sainsbury's plastic milk bottles. I went into Sainsbury's the other day and noticed that the bottles that I drew have been superceded. I didn't think they would be obsolete so soon, but obviously Sainsbury's have their profit margins to think of. They're now made by a company called Plysu, rather than Blowmocan - to a far less elegant design, as well. So already these bottles don't exist.

There's definitely something to do with past and future in a lot of the work. The process I use to make the drawings is the same as that used to document archaic artefacts. But in this case, this activity that will be happening in the future is happening now. Similarly, some people react to the floor pieces in an incredibly nostalgic way in that they evoke memories of lakes, ice and so on. At the same time the work anticipates a theme park where natural phenomena are fabricated and confined, a landscape zoo.

Do you ignore the labels because they won't survive?

The labels will drop off, and their inks will fade, and eventually we'll be left with a stark bottle. The manufacturing process will become more important than the product. You won't see the brand name - you'll home in on the manufacturer, just as you do with a potter's mark.

In all plastic objects, there's one bubble where the injection is made. As technology progresses, this bubble gets less and less crude. Historians in the future will date the object from that kind of detail.

And they'll be able to have a pretty good stab at the origin - which will be a part of the industrialised world. Of course, that's one of the paradoxes about the water pieces. I'm being quite critical about usage, yet the work is ephemeral - the typical exhibition is about a month, then the work's gone. But it's more valuable to focus on a piece intensely for a moment than for years of indiscriminate usage.

When do the water installations work best?

Usually when the piece looks as much at home in the space as possible. It shouldn't look awkward. The installation in Castello di Rivara was the biggest piece I've made. It took two weeks solid, with myself and three other people. The process was like mass production - I can't pretend it was enjoyable. In fact, most of the ways I do things are like factory processes. I think that's correct when you're working in a city. The drawings are akin to a computer process, but it's important for me to do them myself. Somehow, printing the drawings would be anachronistic. It's a time consuming, highly concentrated, almost reverential activity. The labour of it is important for the viewing. It makes you focus on the material, treating something that is usually discarded in a precious way. Mapping and wrapping water is a perverse thing to do, but when it works it has a correctness about it that's as strong as that perversity.

You seem to really enjoy that perversity.

Not so much enjoy - that's just how things are. A lot of this perversity also stems from the fact that the work is incredibly tactile, but refuses any contact with it because of its fragility. The materials keep me at bay as much as they do the viewer. I have to handle the materials extremely gently. Polythene is a terrible material to use, and the slightest mark on the PVC drawings is indelible. So my own process puts up a real barrier. I can't actually get to grips with my own materials, I've got to handle them as though they're precious or contaminated.

How was the map of Britain at the Third Eye Centre made?

I drew the map on acetate which is suspended inside the water. It was based on the way the Ordnance Survey divides the country. I was about to use the skylight in the Third Eye as a basis for the installation, and while I was planning it in my studio, the radio was on - this was as the Gulf War was about to break. My whole image of Britain became much starker, and it became impossible to do what I intended.

Recently you've been working in an office in Italy.

The company's called Information, Knowledge, Organisation and Systems - very computerised, and housed in an old and beautiful villa outside Florence. I wanted the holes I cut to look like early computer, hole-punched print-outs. I've always loved that basic on-off system - either you do something or you don't. It's as if your life is a series of 'yes' and 'no's, but not necessarily in a rational way. The holes were cut through the pristine doors of the library, and they ran like a frieze around all four walls. Through them you could glimpse the books and tools which constitute the real foundation and ideas behind the company. It was also great to go to a space and take things away rather than bringing things in. My proposal for the piece sounded incredibly anarchic, but it was actually very disciplined. There was a lot of trust involved.

In Castello di Rivara, the piece occupied the entire floor space of four rooms, but once it was finished, only part of the work was visible. Again, there was that idea of trust that this was a continuous piece - if it wasn't, the piece wouldn't have worked. That trust is something I'd like to take further. Whether the viewer trusts the artist is one thing, but in this case it was to do with whether the venue trusted the artist.

What was their reaction to it?

It was almost as if it wasn't there. At the opening, a lot of people walked past it. It fitted really nicely. There's a certain ease about it, which forced the viewer to put some work into it. I think that's part of the reason a lot of artists keep things untitled. The hope is that anything learnt from the work will be derived from a much more personal process. Even though it may be someone else's idea, it will seem truer to you because it is routed through your own psychology.

Is all your work untitled?

Yes - for that reason. If you're ever going to believe something, you've got to come to it in your own way. I think that's part of viewing art as an education - it's often the very personal, specific education that works the best.