“Listen to what your work is trying to tell you, because it is the mother of your next work.”

Anthony Gormley’s advice to artists, from an excellent interview on the Art Talk podcast. Lots of insight into his practice and all the wisdom about art and life that you would expect from such a deep thinker and practitioner. I also particularly liked his explanation for using his own body as a basis for much of his work (and interestingly, from very early on in his art journey):

“Can I use this bit of the material world that is closest to me, in fact the bit that I live inside, as both the tool, the material, and the subject of the work? Not because it’s special […] but because it’s the only bit that I can work on from the inside — from the other side of the accident of appearance.”

Lots of great stuff about his choice of materials and ‘the studio as a tool for artmaking’; as well as deciding early on with his wife, the painter, Vicken Parsons, on the life and art practice they wanted, and reverse engineering it to help them decide what to do in the present.