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Patrick StPaul likes collecting weird and wonderful things. His studio, although closed to the public, is reminiscent of the natural history museum crossed with Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory – without the chocolate. The man himself is a little eccentric with fascinating stories to tell, many of which he expresses through his strange and sometimes unnerving sculptures. I went to find out a little bit more about himself and his understanding of the wide world.

Mysterious? Well I suppose we’re all that. My grandfather flew biplanes and took his camera off to the First World War. His grandfather was a butcher and some time before that we were French refugees, or so the story goes. I was born in the 60s and went to school dressed as a Red Indian. Does that answer question? Artist is a strange word isn’t it? It’s loaded somehow, like priest, with an expectation of secret knowledge, so perhaps you’re asking what right I have to be an artist – in which case the answer is Divine Right of Artists.

Who we think we are depends on what stories we choose to believe. So perhaps I could say that mine took place, as I lay sick in bed as a child watching the walls crumble in my fever – or more likely, halfway up a mountain in the rain.

At school I loved the smell of the biology labs but I never had the patience for science. I preferred hunting rabbits and hiding in the woods, not that there’s anything unusual in that. In fact my art teacher said

I’d never pass the GCSE so I ought to do something else.

A desperate longing to get lost in the wilderness. You know,

Meet Patrick StPaul. Words Sufiyeh Hadian

I Live, I Die, (2011)Wood, Cutlery, Dentures and Wings

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all that stuff is so strict – brand identity, the proposition and the brief. I needed to make things simple and I needed the discipline. I suppose there’s a bit of Pilgrim’s Progress about it.

Well it was more like three years and it certainly wasn’t rough all the time but I did disappear for long periods into the mountains. It was wild… It made me realize how much time I had spent skating over the surface and how deep and essentially meaningless is the stuff that lies beneath.

The Scottish hills can be very rough in winter, you have to take them seriously if you want to go and visit – it’s very easy to die. But that is also what makes it beautiful of course. The sound of a buzzard at dusk, knowing you’re ten miles from the nearest road and entirely alone is very special. There are things in the world that supersede humanity, and maybe we need to know we’re irrelevant before we understand how powerful we are.

But there’s a curious paradox here: that it often seems to be the thing you’re not looking for that is the one thing you need. And I think creatively that’s often the case too.

You know I’m not sure I do decide, I think things seize me. It’s all part of an ongoing story, all part of my anthropology, so one thing leads to another. And the interesting part of most stories is that silent thing that creeps up on you and you only notice it when it’s staring you in the face. What matters next is how you understand it – what stories you tell it to make it sit still.

But I’m a collector. I can’t walk past a pile of bones on a hillside without wanting to take them home. After all, you can’t use them if you haven’t got them so the studio is full of boxes of stuff from glass eyes to fox jaws.

Under my grandmother’s bed;

by the side of a road; steaming in the sunlight by a stream; tucked inside the flyleaf of an out-of-date travel book in a public library… sometimes jammed in the letterbox.

The one I’m about to make – or to be really perverse, the one after that but I have to make this one first. At the moment I’m fixated on inheritance, genetic and cultural, so I find those photographs by Duchenne in Darwin’s Expressions of Emotions really compelling… I recently made something I’ve called Nelson’s Elixirs Of Truth And Beauty. They are small boxes containing phials of liquid in which is suspended the dust of an artwork called The Imposter by Mike Nelson which was in the British Pavilion at the Biennale in 2011. I believed in his piece so much I swept

Patrick StPaul working in his studio

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Second Cousin Twice Removed, (2011)Oil and invoices on board with chicken and lace620x810x80

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up some of the dust from the floor and turned it into this faith medicine. Truth is the same as Beauty of course, they’re just packaged differently – so Beauty is wrapped in an excerpt from Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Truth contains a text from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Texture, colour and tribe.

The only way I might get into taxidermy is as a posthumous project – there are too many other things to do before then and other people do it better. But it is undoubtedly compelling. It’s a kind of anthropomorphism in reverse I think. We see ourselves in a snarling fox or a dead sparrow; it’s Life in fairytale. Who is the fairest of them all? We are, because we’re still breathing and they are the ones who are labeled and safely cased. It’s about control I think, and a kind of black humour.

You can’t own pets. You can seduce them with food and affection but ownership is for accountants. But there is a cat I know who thinks he owns me and we have reached an understanding - I have learned to speak his language and to realize that biting is good, and he has promised to haunt me after he is dead. I did own a bluebottle once but it didn’t last.

In the future? Falconry. A goshawk seems like an excellent combination of family pet and functional psychopath.

There are only two possible answers really:Yes, I’m emotionally attached. The things I make are offerings, icons, fetishes of exactly the same nature as Congolese tribal objects of the 19th-century (or any other). And…No, I’m quite happy to sell them for the same reasons that your average Congolese artist was happy to sell their work.The only trouble is my ‘collection’ is thereby dispersing around the world, which will only make it harder to set up the museum later on.

It’s a family totem. It’s the carpenter, the maker,

Daedalus, mixed with the dreamer, the storyteller, Icarus - In fact my grandfather learned to fly at a place called HMS Daedalus on Salisbury Plain. But it’s also Benjamin’s Angel of History: the figure that’s forever retreating, wings outstretched before a heap of broken images. And we’re tucked into that ever-shifting moment trying to make sense of it all. The title comes from the Maori wardance, the haka for obvious reasons.

Mystery, undoubtedly. Shamanism perhaps, but not with any understanding of a world beyond – there’s only so much that anyone can know. Death is the mystery that gives life its point, or pointlessness. Religious, not really - I’ve never been good at sticking

Once Upon A Time, (2011)Giclee print mounted on board

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to the rules. But the desire for religion, the need to belong, to give the world order, that’s fascinating. And in that I see very little difference between the practice of science and that of faith - both are dependent on hypotheses yet to be disproven. As for Philosopher Scientist – I can’t remember when the word scientist was invented, about 1850 I believe.I think in the end though I’d take after an earlier, pre-Rationalist model, one for whom patterns, parallels, symbols and complexity were the issue. The scenic route is always the one you remember.

Not in any material sense – not unless you endow carbon with some sort of genome. But ideas, even personalities linger. Perhaps all art is merely scratching at the walls of the tomb. It’s what underwrites The Physical Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living and what puts the bathos in Banksy.

I think I probably wanted to be a soldier – but not particularly to go round killing things. More because as a child it feels like

you’re in control of the world and you can run around in the woods being important. I was lucky of course to have woods to run around in and that the guns we carried weren’t loaded.

Walking to Constantinople.

The Grant Museum and a junkshop in Greenwich. They’re very similar of course – libraries of objects that have been both revered and ignored that give meaning to the world and purpose to a life. Grant was

Lost Resting Place, (work in progress) (2012)Table, leg, jaws, nest and Beethoven

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a zoologist who invented the sponge I think – that is he first worked out that it was an animal not a plant. Clever chap.

It’s a small wooden vessel, packed like an ark with the materials for constructing a world very like the one we live in now. It floats in a deep green space like a northern sky pocked with stars and is anchored to the earth only by an old rope woven from human hair.OrIt’s a place of torture in which an ill-educated monkey has

been condemned to continually rewrite Shakespeare on a typewriter made of flesh.OrIt’s a petrie dish, a bothy, a campaign tent…

A labyrinth like that constructed by Daedalus to house the Minotaur. And a minotaur.

Well, one project I’m working on is called The Vessel. It’s about a journey, a voyage, and it’s about containment. It’s an encounter between the Scientist and The Wilderness, faith and

fear. The focal point is a boat that is a blend of Viking ship burial and Victorian bird-cage with something a little biblical in the background. And it’s going to be quite big – sea-going if not sea-worthy; large enough for a figure to be laid out in anyway. At the moment we’re still negotiating the venue so I can’t say where and when exactly but the ideal is somewhere between a church and a museum.

And there’s another one brewing that involves a travelling museum dressed up as a horse-drawn hearse. But that’s a whole other story.

Patrick StPaul working in his studio