“Pile Up was inspired by a knick-knack I bought on eBay, a stack of pigs piled one on top of the other; a bizarre but appealing thing. It was like they were emerging out of one form. I had also just visited the Uffizi in Florence where I saw Michelangelo’s The Captives, a series of studies he made where only partial elements of figures appear emerging from stone blocks. I wanted to explore the relationship between these two references. There’s a sexual insinuation in the way the rubber gives an initial binding of the figures, a uniform coating, but also violence in enhancing the dynamics between the forms. With traditional figurative sculpture an artist literally hacks away at something to create or destroy a figure; sculpture is violent. Sculpture is a bodily experience, you are confronted by an object that inhabits the same space as you do.”