Marc Quinn, artist
Around 1999, I started making sculptures of people with differently shaped bodies. I wanted to celebrate a different kind of beautiful, a kind of body other than what you normally see in art. I approached the British Paralympic Association and through them contacted Peter Hull [the British swimmer and Paralympic gold medallist] and made a sculpture of him. Pete was a friend of Alison Lapper and he put me in touch with her. By the time she agreed for me to sculpt her, Alison was pregnant with her late son Parys. I thought: “Wonderful! Pregnancy is about the future!” I thought the sculpture could be a monument to the future, when a great deal of sculpture is a monument to the past.
