About six months ago, Ren Renwick (RWA Director) and George Ferguson (Chair of Trustees, RWA) contacted me about creating an artwork that would help connect the inside of the building with the outside.  

In response I created an artwork called ‘Negotiating Space' a kilometer long line drawing made out of magenta ribbon.  

It started on Whiteladies Road, hopped over to the to the Methodist church, entered the RWA building, before exiting and heading down the road to the university. 

The work is about connecting civic institutions and spaces as well as creating a temporary public art intervention. 

This work is an experiment, what is the most surprising element that has come out creating Negotiating Space?  

Yeah, the artwork is an experiment, and it's given us an opportunity to test out what happens when you put a kilometer of ribbon around the architecture of the RWA and the surrounding buildings.  

We've had to deal with the wind and the weather, and so we've learned a lot about fixtures and fixings. It has also been a way just to see how the piece visually works,  when you stand on the other side of the road and you look at the artwork you look at the drawing, does it, you know, can does it register? Can you read it? Is it fun? You know, how do you interpret it?  

It has given me a lot to think about. And, I've learned a lot from it. 

Your work explores the public realm. Why do you think work in the public realm is an important thing to create? 

I really enjoy making artwork in the public realm. There's something very democratic about it. You can reach very broad and diverse audience. In fact, you reach everybody. So anyone who goes down the Whiteladies Road and passes the RWA will see this sort of creative intervention – there is something really nice about that. 

I like the way presenting artwork outside means that artworks change depending on the wind and the weather and the time of day. Public art is much harder to present artwork outside compared to indoors, because you've got all those external factors to consider, things also like vandalism and stuff like that has to be considered.  

But I really enjoy it. And also, there is a percentage of the population who never feel that they're s welcome into an art centre or opera house or a theatre, so by presenting artwork on the outside, you reach everyone - that's the reason I like making public art. 

What public art do you admire?  

I don't know where to begin with that! There's too many options. Okay, I like, there's James Turrell’s carved volcano, it's called the Rodin crater, and it's over in Arizona, and for the last 40 or 50 years, this artist has been carving away at this volcano to almost act as an a astronomical clock.  

He is the ‘grandfather of light art’, which emerged as a movement in the 1960s and he is very famous for these things called Sky spaces, which are like apertures in a room, little hole in the room. You can see the sky, and the light pours down, and you contemplate, and the sun moves across and creates this amazing atmosphere of light and shape.  

 So, yeah, I quite like that. It's quite ambitious and quite cool.