theEYE: Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn remains best known for his sculptures cast from parts of his body. The first of these, Self (initially cast in 1991), was created with nine pints of his frozen blood. Yet, as this profile demonstrates, his art over the past decade has embraced an exciting and diverse range of materials, including lead, ice, wax, glass, frozen flowers and even DNA. His sculptures include both figurative and semi-abstract forms, but each engages with his key preoccupations: life and mortality, self and identity, nature and the world of science. His drawings and photographs similarly teem with ideas about being alive - and about facing death - in today’s world. In this profile, Marc Quinn speaks eloquently and thoughtfully about many of his key works, including his recent series of classical marble portraits of amputees and people born without limbs, as well as the moving portrait of his son Lucas as a baby modelled from frozen placenta.