 I'm Stephen Cox, I'm a sculptor, I'm 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, 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 them in 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, Lagoon Bracciano at a place called Angolara which was close to the Peperino quarries which was the building material of Rome before the Travertines so it was a 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, it 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 Peperino 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 that 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 civilisation is going to go often requires 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 as a gift 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 In meeting the Minister of Culture in Cairo I met a man who had been a very good friend 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 military zone when I first went there So access to the imperial 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 that are still standing and one of the pieces that I brought back that 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