scraps

Tell me about your personal influences, not historical ones.

In the two-year interval between school and art college, I met this old guy. He was my next-door neighbor, and I used to see him wandering the streets during the daytime and returning home every night with the objects he'd collected. He was like a bag man. One day he disappeared, so I climbed his fence to see what had happened. I went into his house and I couldn't believe how much stuff was crammed into each room. There was sixty years of existence in there. There were tubes of toothpaste -- over two hundred -- all completely empty and neatly organized. There were newspapers and magazines and soft porn. The stacks were chaos at the top, but they became more and more organized as you went through them.... His whole house was like one hell of an installation. I didn't realize it at the time, but that affected me more than anything else.

contemporary artist Damien Hirst, interviewed by David Furnish, Interview magazine, September 1997

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