 I'm Stephen Cox, I'm a sculptor and English and I'm generally known for working in stone and in particular I'm very very interested in working with the hardest stones in the world, in particular imperial porphyry. My interest in working in stones in a more specific way or historical way was to do with the fact that when I moved from England to Italy to begin work on an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale my work was out of a kind of conceptual minimal background and I was working with ideas of developing from a tabula rasa from big plaster reliefs made with building materials in the building process these things were not architecture, they weren't sculpture and they weren't painting or they were all of those things but precisely the activity of making these things was as a temporary installation, this was back in the late 70s using building plaster and as I say just common regard and building techniques so there was the demystification of the processes of art but one of the things that's developed from the very first pieces I made which were to do with relief, if you like, the minute a line is either engraved into a surface or a line is seen to evolve from the addition of material then the space of otherwise blankness becomes ambiguous in terms of spatiality so I was working on these panels that were leaning against walls and the reference on the surface by using illusionistic techniques through using Alberti's principles of single point perspective the images on the surface of these either carved stones or leaning slabs was an image of the space within which the panel was leaning so I was involved in a pictorialism which really opened up a whole idea of working from an idea of an artist being someone involved in the dialogue with contemporary issues so using Vasari's on technique I travelled around Italy visiting the quarries of the stones that he listed as being of interest to the artists of the Renaissance so at the beginning I was in Milan, I went to places that were of particular interest to Adrian Stokes so I went to the quarries of red Verona marble and subtypes like bronzetto di valpolicella which was a beautiful kind of champagne coloured stone from the Verona region and I suppose that was my main sort of interest in the land and then I went south to Florence and I went to visit the quarries that produced the beautiful blue sandstone of Piazza Serena, Piazza Forte and associated materials in that area and then when I went south to Rome where I was then to house near Bracciano, the place called Anguillara which was close to the Pepparino quarries and the building material of Rome before Travertine was written so it was a kind of very profound significance to the Etruscan civilisation and the interest in the historical as well as the materiality of these stones listed by Vasari and worked in these places and created exhibitions using these stones Interestingly the one stone that was not listed was not available in Italy but listed by Vasari was the very very hard deep red and liverish stone called Imperial Porphyry they knew I think that it came from Egypt but nevertheless no one had a source for it but its interest which Alberti became profoundly kind of obsessed by was how with the metallurgy of the Renaissance it was impossible to carve this material how did the Romans deal with it which they did with extraordinary imagination there was obviously a fantastic will to master this hardest of stones so these are things that became of particular interest to me and I had been working in Italy, I had a studio at the American Academy and I worked on this exhibition using at that time Pepparino stone and exhibited in Rome at a gallery called La Salita which was quite a well known radical gallery which coincidentally was the place where Richard Serra had his first exhibition when he was a student at the American Academy so as time went by I did some interesting exhibitions I hope in various places working in Florence, working on ideas with fragmentation the idea of archaeology being if you like as creative for the present as it's to do with trying to give an indication of what came down to us in the past so the scientific analysis, the sort of forensic look at fragments marks on stone what they mean with some fat somehow very reassuring that whatever happens in the past whatever comes to cause let's say an extraordinary change in the powers that be in directing how civilizations are going to go often require some kind of iconoclasm but the extraordinary say forensic analysis of things of the past enable us to rebuild a picture of the past and see how the passage of time is changed by all sorts of forces so I left to go back to England and out of the blue a couple of years after I returned I was asked by the Foreign Office the British kind of foreign policy department who we've always had an idea I think in England for the soft power of art and so the British Councils had a very very profound interest in politics in a subtle way and I was asked if I would be prepared to make a sculpture for the opera house in Cairo and I left to the Egyptian people from the British so this rang a bell and I was very very excited about the possibility of being able to negotiate access to the imperial porphyry quarries of the eastern mountains of Egypt which I knew a bit about I'd done some research and so this sequence of events enabled me to go meet some people it was amazing that amongst the people I met was the Minister of Culture in Egypt who had happened to have been friend of the Minister of Culture in Cairo I met a man who had been a very good friend and while he was director of the Egyptian Academy in Rome of Giovanni Carrendente who had been a great friend of many American artists and was very very significant in the selection the invitation to David Smith, one of my heroes to represent contemporary art 25 years before in this related festival so whilst I was in Egypt I was able to speak a bit of Italian and communicate with the Egyptian ambassador who was very very helpful to me and through the minerals, geological mining and mapping authority of Egypt I was given access to the quarries and negotiations with the military because this area was a militarized zone when I first went there so access to the imperial porphyry quarries was given to me and since then I've tried to maintain access to the material through various people who collect stones in the desert and sell them through various sources in Egypt and so here we have in my studio in Shropshire about 20 tons of porphyry about 15 tons of which came back just a couple of years ago to go with the material that I brought back after I had finished my project for the opera house in Cairo I'm pleased to say that the sculpture that was made for it there's a pair of sculptures are still standing and one of the pieces that I brought back which wasn't selected for that particular job is in the collection of the Tate Gallery and another piece, a very large piece is here with us here which we can see later Now you've seen Stephen Cox discuss Peregrine Sentinel and I wanted to bring in a few more views of that sculpture that I didn't capture in the video that I made when I was there in his house so here we're looking at the front and sides of Peregrine Sentinel and you can see the wonderful variety of textures one of the things that Stephen emphasizes in his work is the relationship that he has with the material and it's a great deal of respect as I'm sure you've noticed by now for what it took to form this imperial porphyry for how rare it is, for how difficult it is to work and for the weight of history and symbolism that it has and so a lot of that is reflected here you might notice the wonderful sort of abstracted bird shape but you might also notice that the form here also resembles that of a female figure a lot of his work tends to explore really sort of classic abstract forms that could be read in a multitude of ways and the other thing I want you to notice is the attention being played to different textures and to sort of responding to the different faces of the stone so here we see those views and here we have a slightly better detail here we're looking at the side of the sculpture and a detail of the front and top you can see the unfinished texture that we have at the top of the sculpture and also down at the very foot of the sculpture and then the entire back has been left in that sort of unfinished broken state that you would have for stone coming directly from the quarry I love this particular detail of the stone in Peregrine Sentinel here this is at the base of the sculpture and you can see this very rough, unfinished piece of the sculpture and it shows all of those working marks and you can get a sense from this of just how difficult it is to work these hard stones like porphyry, basalt and diorite the normal tools and techniques that would work on softer stones like the alabaster and marble we'll cover later are completely ineffective they're completely ineffective against this sort of stone it all has to be worked with sort of punches perpendicularly against the stone and those tools wear out very much more quickly even if you're using power assisted tools the process is much, much slower so there's a real awareness here and a desire to show the evidence of the difficulty of that working here's a short video from Steven's sculpture yard and we're looking at a piece that is a similar size and shape to Peregrine Sentinel and you can see here how he has marked up some of the forms on the stone with the intent of carving in and creating a finished sculpture here's Steven with one of his larger and earlier pieces in Imperial Porphyry this is a work called Dreadnaught and it's a piece in which he's been exploring the Imperial Porphyry and sort of its condition and the things that have happened to it over its history the pits and hollows that you see in this work are from pieces of tuff that he gouged out and dug out of this enormous piece of Imperial Porphyry it also had a split down the middle and that was then gilded by Steven you can see that gold shining in the sun and then if you notice there are a bunch of sort of parallel stripes on the face of this piece and those are tool marks from the Roman quarrymen who were originally sort of roughing out this piece it was ultimately abandoned in the quarry until Steven brought it back to Britain and worked with it now I'm showing you a closer view of Dreadnaught and you can see that line of gold there to call your attention to that split in the porphyry and that may well be why the Romans abandoned it in the quarry also all of those large inclusions of tuff might have made this a less desirable piece of stone for the Roman masons but you can see their initial marks from drills that they used to kind of cut down in and used to split the stone and we'll see some wedge marks on the other side in just a moment here on the backside of Dreadnaught you can see some of those tuff inclusions that haven't been removed by Steven they look like big chunks of marshmallow in a jello salad for example and more of those sort of drill marks from the Romans there are a few sort of square cut marks too that are evidence of wedges that would have been driven in as part of the stone splitting process and what I think is so interesting about Steven Cox and his work is that for one thing he's one of the only sculptors currently working in these hard stones today his assistant Tim is following in his footsteps in a way using basalt and deliberately working with hard stones but these are materials that in many ways are materials of the past not of the present and in Steven Cox's work we see a dialogue between a present day sculptor and these very ancient important materials he has tremendous respect for them and the work that he does represents a sort of conversation that he has with these materials and when you examine his work and really look at it and we'll see some more work when we get to alabaster you really get a sense, a better sense of those materials thanks to Steven's intervention as a sculptor