Richard Deacon

The sculptor Richard Deacon is one of the outstanding artists of his generation. His work can be found in most of the world's major galleries. He works mainly in metal and wood and his complex manipulations of surface allude to both the human body and industrial techniques. He won the Turner Prize in 1987.

Richard Deacon's work.

I have visited the Horniman Museum in South London a lot over the years. One of the objects in the collection there that I find particularly intriguing is a Tibetan ghost trap. It's quite simple, a wooden frame cross braced with a web of threads across it and a short handle rather like a large square racket of some sort, but four sided. What I find interesting is the relation between object and concept - if there's a ghost trap, ergo, there are ghosts. It occurs to me that the relation between the LHC at CERN and the Higgs Boson is similar, that in a way the technology predicates the existence of the phenomenon.

In presenting some of my work at CERN I described a situation whereby a material object and an empty volume co-existed in the same space. My remarks about the ghost trap and the LHC are apropos in that it is the sculpture that causes a phenomenon to manifest itself or at least enable me to bring it into some sort of discourse. So when I was talking to Tatiana whilst she was takingsome photographs for the project, I told her I was making a particle detector, using plaster and Sainsburys food containers. However it's probably more true to say that I am making a kind of archetype, prototype or model. It's a kind of core or blank to be realised rather than the thing itself.

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