So I worked directly from various fonts and was very rigorous about them and made three-dimensional versions of these two-dimensional tiny things. Something inconspicuous became an object you had to negotiate in space. We become like the characters in the narrative of these things; they are literally punctuation that we move around—which is obviously a reference to sculpture and how it operates, but in a very simple, stripped back way.

Tell me about the models of all the world’s fighter planes in Parade?

That started with a collection of images from newspapers of the fighter planes of the world for my studio reference. It was important that they were collected from the real world—from how these images come into my own personal world through newspapers. From that I ended up making a focused collection of one of every single type of fighter plane currently in commission around the world. Parade I see very much as like the big description I made of Apocalypse Now, this massive handwritten text, in that it’s a completely unedited war-scape.

There’s a certain ludicrousness to the way I’ve become completely involved in what it takes to make those models. And of course in making them I’m referring to the millions of little boys every year who do the same thing. There’s this getting into the psychology of people who get seduced by that—and I suppose ultimately it’s about the aesthetics of destruction.