In extracts from his new book, the Turner prize-winning artist reflects on three of his best known works
. The research process took about two years and consisted of travelling up to the area and talking to people who had been involved in the strike. We recruited former miners from towns and villages within a 30-mile radius of Orgreave: Barnsley, Doncaster, Sheffield, Rotherham. These meetings started off being low-key, often one-to-one in a pub or in somebody’s home.
The reenactment was a public event, which was important for me as a form of public enquiry or, more viscerally, an autopsy of an exhumed corpse. Or even possibly as a reenactment of a crime in its original setting. Whatever it was, it was always, in my mind at least, performance art. It was never meant to heal community wounds – however much art is heralded as being capable of achieving this. If anything, it was intended to make people angry again.
A country or institution that can’t laugh at itself is in trouble. Sacrilege was my attempt to help with this situation, a life-sized inflatable model of Stonehenge, was created. I was trying to think what the stupidest idea that was possible to make would be, the sort of thing you might see on. It was made more or less by hand in Grantham by a company called Inflatable World Leisure. The inflatable stones were all individually painted.
Throughout 2019 and 2020, large parts of Australia were destroyed by a number of bushfires: Forty-six million acres of land were burned and it is estimated that up towere displaced or killed. The Murdoch media in the country had initially attempted to ignore the story. When it became clear that they couldn’t, they were happy to repeat accusations that environmentalists had started the fires.
I turned off online comments as they seemed to be getting out of hand, though I wish I had taken screenshots of this billionaire pile-on. I actually felt a bit sorry for them, trying to gain some sympathy for themselves from the situation. Little did the Murdochs know that, later that year, I had a work in the pipes where a likeness of Bad Grandpa and Uncle Lachlan would literally be burned.
The whole process happened remotely, during lockdown. It was kept a secret because of the reach of the Murdoch press in Australia, particularly in Melbourne, where Rupert was born.
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