I studied at a time when buildings were sterile things, and their creators were hands-off people - super-intelligent people, but you felt they didn't love the stuff buildings are made from.
The men resent a woman getting any honour in what they consider is essentially their field. Men painters mostly despise women painters. So I have decided to stop squirming, to throw any honour in with Canada and women.
I had this idea that I wanted to do this mixture of visions of African American women and visions of African American men. And call it 'The Men' and call it 'The Women' and show different faces of these two people.
I loved the glamour and excitement of the games and, in particular, knowing the names of each and every one of the referees - that's because my mom, a former basketball player, would yell at them from our front-row seats for making bad calls!
I grew up painting and playing piano so when I was a little kid I thought I was going to be an artist or a painter but my mom had me taking piano lessons for about 10-12 years as a young kid.
There was a 'magic rock' my mom would lift up, and under the rock was a bunch of bugs. Roly-poly bugs and worms. Somehow I thought that it was a magical world of insects, and I wanted to go there. It was the same impulse as 'Pikmin' - I wanted to go ...
But I'm the only one who can paint the moon, because I'm the only one who knows whether that's right or not.
Help us to recognize your voice, help us not to be allured by the madness of the world, so that we may never fall away from you, O Lord Jesus Christ.
If only someone else could paint what I see, it would be marvellous, because then I wouldn't have to paint at all.
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.
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.
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.
I think scale is about, in a way, the apprehension of proportion, and all the proportions that mean things to us as human beings are related to the body.
How do you make the timelessness of inert, silent objects count for something? How to use the, in a way, dumbness of sculpture in a way that acts on us as living things?
It doesn't matter if you can't speak the same language. If you have pictures, or better still, if you can draw things, then you can communicate anything to anyone.
I wouldn't say I'm addicted, but I never, ever skip yoga. I use it to calm down and slow down.
There's something that happens with the collection of a large amount of data when it's dumped into an Excel spreadsheet or put into a pie chart. You run the risk of completely missing what it's about.
The trouble with progress is that it tends to happen slowly and quietly. It's not necessarily going to shout about itself, or make the nightly news like a disaster or a scandal would.
They say an elephant never forgets. Well, you are not an elephant. Take notes, constantly. Save interesting thoughts, quotations, films, technologies... the medium doesn't matter, so long as it inspires you.
I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don't. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I'll come back to.
