he can make exactly what he wants to make

and it's amazing to see him sculpting in the studio

because the forms just sort of come out of nowhere

the process of sculpting may take anything from

a few week to many months

It's not a sort of miracle for him to achieve that degree of detail

because he is very technically proficient

The scale is very crucial

this head wouldn't be the same thing at all if it was smaller than life size

if it was a few inches or if it was ten feet long

it would have quite a different effect

Each hair is a piece of nylon line

which is sanded and painted and curled by applied heat

and then a little hole is drilled and the hair is inserted

It's always very interesting to take a work out of its own environment

and put it somewhere alien

Looking at the Easter island statue, the greatest statue

and Ron Mueck

It's amazing, it's wonderful watching visitors

look from the Mueck to the Easter Island statue

engage with the absolute realism of the surface and the texture of the Mueck

and then the great schematic abstractions of the Easter Island

and realising they're actually about the same thing

Every generation wants to go

beyond the bounds of its own human limitations

and that actually there is only a limited number of ways of doing that

and that's about scale it's about materials it's about texture

but what you can do with that is limitless