Ricky Swallow

In the photo, I am standing next to The Exact Dimensions of Staying Behind. It's carved from one solid Judd-like block of lime wood. The skeleton's pose is a composite of a number of influences—Bernini's floor mosaics of praying skeletons, Powell graphics, and Saint Francis in Ecstasy. It is trapped in a past time and straddles its staff in desperation, head tilted to the heavens, seeking some kind of release. This sculpture is one of three new works I completed for Venice, titled This Time Another Year. It's a strange thing—a great thing—to have it in Venice, where it has this bulging audience. The works are made in such isolation that you forget they have this higher purpose, and when I complete something, it's a long time before I want to be around it again. But witnessing the curiosity of others is rewarding.

I can't seem to break this skeletal fascination. In a previous work, which is also at the Biennale, a skull is fused deep into a beanbag, almost swallowed by it. Here, the skull is propped up by a skeletal plinth. It was an ambitious work to make, perhaps the most ambitious ever—a perverse whittling project to make it out of the one piece of wood. But it's also more self-consciously classical, and the decision to leave it with a carved finish rather than a sanded one was making less of an apology for this pastime of carving, so that more of the performance shows through. We freighted all of the works to Venice. They arrived finally in these canoe-ended long boats. Waving off the work and hoping for its safe arrival was a new thing. The thought of this skeleton reduced to drift- wood and washing up in Sicily somewhere....