NARRATOR:

If you think about it, the human eye acts like a portal between your internal reality and the external world. This shape plays with the idea of interior and exterior space too. It has volume and shape and takes up a whole lot of space, but it’s also mostly air — barely there.

RICHARD DEACON:

At the time I was using a lot of references to sensory apparatus: the eyes, ears, mouths noses …

NARRATOR:

That’s artist, Richard Deacon.

DEACON:

“For Those Who Have Eyes,” really came out of being given a whole pile of very thin stainless steel sheet. It was off-cuts from the cladding of consumer toasters or something. It’s very, very thin, very flimsy, but it’s also quite kind of hard to cut and quite hard to drill.

SFX: The sounds of a drilling, sawing through metal.

DEACON:

…and the structure is almost trying to work out how big a thing you could make out of such a flimsy material without adding any additional support to it. They join together by kind of self-made little cleats cut out of the excess bits of material.

SFX: we hear the sounds of this labor

DEACON:

I’ve learned a lot about how you stick pieces of metal together and…all that bending, rolling, pushing, all of that was kind of active work and I thought that should be visible.

SFX: Final strike against metal, sounds of work fade metal