 (1980) started as a drawing. I lay on the floor and my wife drew around me. I made this silhouette into a contour map, making an approximation of the volume of my body divided into two identical halves: mirror images of each other. The piece is roughly the same size as a king-sized double bed. I began a programme of eating that lasted three-and-a-half months, during which I ate my own volume in bread.

Before I began using my teeth, I had been using bread to make marquetry collages within the crust of a slice. 

 (1979) is a loaf of bread laid out one bite at a time, taking a common object which is close to life and presenting it in the way in which we experience it. I used the most commonly bought processed white bread in Britain: 'Mother's Pride'.

Bread and settled human life go together. 

 is a measuring of life, the distance we go, the distance we travel in a body, a moment at a time. Bites of bread laid out on the floor, footprints in the snow, bites in bread, traces in time.

At the same time, I was making simple silhouette pieces from a single thickness of sliced bread stuck on the wall. 

 (1982) was a play on the Assumption, and a materialised reversal of transubstantiation. 

 (1982) imposes the memory of the foetal body on a manufactured life-supporting material. 

 (1982) is a late-20th-century version of Mantegna's dead Christ.

Sculpture has traditionally been about imposing mind over matter by an act of intelligence and will. I was looking for a more natural process, and eating is the primal process by which matter is transformed into mind.

Bread Works

, 1979, bread, diameter: 330 mm × 8 mm high.

Disk

, 1979, bread, 1 × 1500 × 3 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

Bread Line

, 1980, bread and wax, 28 × 220 × 168 cm. Tate Collection, London, England.

, 1982, bread and wax, 261 × 169 × 1.6 cm.

Consumption

, 1982, bread and wax, 20 × 90 × 1.6 cm.

Soul

, 1982, bread and wax, 192 × 286 × 1.6 cm.

Man Made

, 1992, bread, wax, 285.5 × 230 × 1.6 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

Mother’s Pride II

2007, bread and wax, 285.5 × 230 × 1.6 cm. Photograph by Stephen White, London.

Mother’s Pride III

, 2008, bread and wax, 9.46 × 11.02 × 4.93 m (internal measurements of gallery 3 at MARCO, Monterrey). Installation view, MARCO, Monterrey, Mexico, 2008. Photograph by Roberto Ortiz, Monterrey, Mexico.

Bread Room

, 2012, bread and wax, 255 × 192 × 1.6 cm. Collection of Palm Springs Art Museum, CA, USA. Installation view, CCBB, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Photograph by Vicente de Mello.

Mother’s Pride IV

 2019, bread and wax, 306 × 209.5 × 2 cm. Installation view, Royal Academy, 2019. Photograph by Oak Taylor-Smith.

Bread Works

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