When he was younger and his parents were out of the house, Ed Atkins used to sit on the landing and force himself to imagine all the ways they might die. “My thinking was that if I imagined it first, then it would be very unlikely to actually happen,” says the 42-year-old artist.
Atkins’ parents didn’t succumb to any of the ways he had invented. But during the final year of his master’s course, his father, Philip, was diagnosed with cancer and died six months later, during Atkins’ degree show, in 2009. “It’s a huge thing, obviously, losing your father,” says the artist. “And it started to feed into what I was reading and was interested in. His death, and death generally, is in all of my work.”
