Recently I installed two tall wooden sculptures outside a gallery against a backdrop of endless rows of grape vines. They were there for the duration of an exhibition – a matter of six weeks. They didn’t survive. Oriented east-west to emulate the ancient stone structures raised all over the landscape of Europe to predict equinoxes, the weather side, west, was battered by winter wind and rain until the glued joints in the forms gave way and wooden pieces fell like autumn leaves onto the garden beds where they mingled with the decorative wood chips. They reminded me, curiously, of Ephesus the ancient Roman city on the edge of Turkey. I walked its streets and listened to the guide but what interested me were the gathered and numbered random pieces of weathered marble that were once buildings and columns. Archeologists had laid them in rows like a giant jigsaw puzzle in the vain expectation that the chaos would suddenly make sense and buildings be resurrected.  Much of Ephesus was lying where it had fallen over two thousand years but in my mind these organised rows of marble remnants had taken on a new ‘life’ as an art installation even as they slowly atrophied.

In many ways the ruins and my destroyed sculptures were analogous to the brevity and fragility of our existences, existences on a grand and local scale haunted by entropy. Their destruction suggested a certain pathos endemic to all ruins that nature will reclaim and consume everything that humankind has constructed even if the pyramids threaten to outlive us all. Nevertheless, decline and collapse have become consistent themes of contemporary art whether through installations that recycle the detritus of human existence, comment upon the sheer waste of raw materials or as in the case of Phyllida Barlow present what can be termed ‘immanent entropy’ in that her monumental works are in a state of seeming collapse or at least moving to a new state as we watch.

The destruction of my sculptures didn’t bother me. There was a certain fascination with the processes of atrophy. The fact that they were outside the gallery while ten others were inside protected by walls and curators, in some ways separated them from the commercial process I had willingly undertaken when I agreed to a catalogue entry and a price. The pricing was a flippant gesture to consumerism and I was under no illusion that anyone would be buying them given their size and now their new identity had removed them from the consumerist equation and yet in many ways they had simply moved on to a new stage of existence. Much of the wood I used to build them came from building site skips where it had already assumed four lives from living trees to standardised milled sizing to house frame construction to throwaway waste. I gave it a fifth in constructing a sculpture from the discarded offcuts and nature then took over. The denuded forms still bore the marks of missing bits now scattered across the garden bed and turning black as they absorbed water and soil. The analogy to human existence wasn’t lost on me and nor was the separation between the roles played by the sculptures inside the gallery space and those outside. While the two now in pieces in the garden had ceased to be of interest to the gallery owners, the ones inside were still precious as Art.

The preservation at all costs of Art, often locked in temperature-controlled vaults beneath museums from whence it may never see the light of day, could be seen as a form of human arrogance. Stalling the inevitable atrophy – think of the constant upkeep of Blue Poles to prevent the detritus of Pollock’s studio from falling in a heap on the floor of the National Gallery- is arrogance in itself. A work of art, whether it is a painting, sculpture or whatever, represents a moment in time in the life of the artist. It is an extension of what went before and presages what came after. To isolate it on a gallery wall in perpetuity and put a price on it in many ways is counter to the creative process let alone the vicarious vicissitudes of nature. Already my destroyed sculptures have been recycled as other works bearing the marks of six weeks in a garden bed and their exhibition state exists only as a photograph, however inadequate in its one-dimensional view. Most of the work of Barlow similarly exists now only as photographs with the components recycled as something else. The question as to which point in the cycle of creativity is the one to preserve remains open. In a further example, the debate as to whether to clean centuries of candle soot from the Sistine Chapel ceiling, left officials, experts and tourists in a quandary. The photographed and much-reproduced version was of dulled colour as the result of the atrophy of chapel use. I still don’t know what they did.

I expect my existence to be no more than a blip in history if it is recorded at all and all of the Art I have produced to end up as landfill. That doesn’t deny the process through which they were created but nor does it elevate them artificially beyond the natural processes of atrophy and entropy. I would be delighted if someone picked up the pieces and recycled them as something new rather than hanging a single version on a wall – but that’s just me.