Phillip King #2

Phillip King and his work in his studio, London, 2014.

"....
We’re in a former workshop off a main road near his home. Across the road is a builders’ merchant at which King is an almost daily customer. Inside the studio is like a bigger version of a grandfather’s shed – workbenches littered with power tools and tins of acrid sealant, shelves lined with boxes of odds and ends, scraps of material left over or waiting to be used. Outside are the remnants of a lorry load of slate he acquired in the mid-1970s and hasn’t quite exhausted.

Roof lights at the back of the ground floor create a perfect working space, where he is currently turning a six-inch model into a six-foot sculpture – he doesn’t do preparatory drawings, preferring to develop the work as he goes. Upstairs is an office and kitchen, and a kind of gallery lined with maquettes and test pieces: some recent, some from the beginning of his career. Roughly drawn little people give a sense of proportion. One large model of a yet-to-completed work shows a whole gallery, with sculptural elements made from bamboo and a special fluorescent plastic that glows around its cut edges.
...."
(bron: Tate, foto's: Robin Friend)