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This started off with a friend's house... on stilts. I had been reading this book of
history about the Middle Ages and houses fortified behind walls and walled gardens and having
to grow their own food and keep the pigs out, or someone out, and keep everyone else in
and compounds. Of course Bin Laden had just been killed and his house had this huge wall
around it. You go to South America and the rich have these big houses and big walls around
them and the moment you kind of feel - I don't know if it's that because I read Cormac McCarthy's
'The Road' - but you feel things are just at that point where everything could just
completely collapse. I suppose I'm a 'lefty' in that sense and I suppose what I found about
when we were in a Labour government that it was more inclusive, I felt. Of course I think
there's much more of a divide and it's getting more and more divisive, and so in my paintings,
I suppose, these sorts of themes are going on at the moment; of the 'Garden of Eden'
on Earth but also very much being paid for at a cost.