Scott Covert isn’t where he should be for our interview. “He’s probably in a graveyard somewhere,” sighs his PR. Cemeteries, after all, are this artist’s stomping ground. Covert makes work out of tombstones.
When he shows up, we talk about the last graveyard he visited: Edgwarebury in Edgware, London. Its most famous resident is the singer Amy Winehouse, who died in 2011 aged 27. Her gravestone, like many Covert goes to see, was festooned with flowers left by well-wishers. Covert did what he always does: he took out a piece of canvas and an oil stick, then made a rubbing of the words on the stone. The previous day, he had visited Bunhill Fields in Islington, making a rubbing of William Blake’s tombstone on the same canvas. “They’re both poets,” he says. “I’m going to put them side by side.”
