'But you can't invest it with meaning after you've made it...'

Anish Kapoor in conversation with John Tusa.

JT So if there were no commissions at all, what would you do in the morning?



AK Oh that's great, I’d love that. I would come to the studio and do my thing. What one does in the studio in fact is to pose a series of problems to oneself. You can come in and say, yes I have this funny notion that I want to make a blob of gooey mass of certain dimensions, that has a certain effect. And then, having made it, I've got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There's enough stuff in the world anyway!



JT But you can't invest it with a meaning after you've made it.



AK Oh, those processes are complex. One can find a way to do precisely that. Naming is one of those ways. Context is another. What happens if I put it next to another object? How does that change its reason for being, its effect on the body? One of the phenomena that I've worked with over many years is darkness. Darkness is a fact that we all know about, an idea about the absence of light. Very simple. What interests me however is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that's akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror. A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness that I can generate, let's say a block of stone with a cavity in it can have a darkness, is resident in you already; that you know already. This is not a verbal connection, but a bodily one. That's why sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

.