Steve Dilworth: Artefacts from an Imagined Tribe

For more than forty years Steve Dilworth has lived and worked on the Isle of Harris in Scotland's Outer Hebrides, developing one of the most distinctive sculptural practices in contemporary British art. Working with materials including stone, bog oak, bone, whale vertebrae, bronze, animal remains and found objects, his sculptures appear simultaneously ancient and contemporary, archaeological and visionary.

Often discussed through ideas of myth, ritual and shamanism, Dilworth's work resists simple interpretation. Instead, his sculptures emerge through an intense engagement with materials, place and process. Throughout his practice, questions of truth, transformation and material integrity remain central concerns.

Steve’s work is a personal favourite of mine and in this conversation, Dilworth reflects on the making of The Hanging Figure (1979), a pivotal work that fundamentally altered his understanding of sculpture and established many of the principles that continue to underpin his practice today.

The Hanging Figure

BZ - You've spoken before about The Hanging Figure being a really important turning point in your practice. What was it about making that work that changed your understanding of what art could be?

SD - Up to that point I'd been making things out of salted meat. I started with simple heads made from preserved pork, then moved on to full-sized figures that I called The King, The Queen and The Magician. Around that time, I had a dream. In it, a witch told me, "Whatever question you ask will be answered."

It felt almost like a threat. Like opening Pandora's Box.

I wrote the dream down, burned it, and placed the ashes between sheets of glass as part of a sculpture. After that I started thinking about what the ultimate figure might be. Most of my work was figurative, so I wondered what would happen if I combined a human skeleton with the flesh of another animal.

I eventually obtained a human skeleton and the carcass of a calf. The skeleton was male but I built a female form around it. The idea wasn't to make a portrait; it was to create a new entity from two different beings.

As I worked, I became increasingly conscious of the materials themselves. Everything was rejected material. The skeleton was discarded for medical use as it was so decalcified, the calf came from a knacker's yard. I even used its heart and liver. While sewing the spine together I found myself obsessing over details, thinking that knots should alternate from one side to the other. I started behaving as though I was constructing a real thing.

What changed was that I realised I wasn't making something about a thing anymore. The work was the thing. The materials had to be important. I couldn’t cheat and I couldn’t add things in. I wanted it to be as natural as possible. It took a whole year to make and I felt at the time that I was an idiot was playing around mixing sulphur, charcoal and saltpetre without knowing I'm making dynamite and gunpowder without knowing it. I realised I was working with materials that carried enormous power. This wasn't representation. It wasn't symbolism. It was a real object. It wasn’t about something, it was something.

When The Hanging Figure was later exhibited alongside works that referenced bodies, skeletons and mortality, I realised that mine was different. Other works represented these ideas through plaster, plastic or imitation materials. Mine actually contained the thing itself.

Everything I've made has followed that principle. It's not just what a sculpture looks like that matters. It's what it actually is. The Hanging Figure totally changed my life. It is not an intellectual pursuit it is something that comes from the gut.

Making Things That Are True

BZ - That feels connected to something that runs throughout your work - a commitment to truthfulness in materials.

SD - Yes. I often imagine a tribe living on the other side of a mountain. Everything I make belongs to them. Of course, the tribe doesn't exist. It's completely fictional. But it gives me a way of thinking. I'm not inventing objects so much as discovering them.

I think sculpture is a bit like poetry. The materials matter. Their histories matter. The way things are constructed matters.

Take The Rook, for example. It's made from bog oak, horseshoe nails and a rook. The piece came directly after The Hanging Figure. I wanted the materials themselves to remain visible and active within the work. If I exposed too much of the bird it would become overwhelmingly about the bird. But if I concealed too much it would lose its connection to the material.

The sculpture becomes a three-dimensional poem composed of iron, bog oak and rook.

Because of that, I don't like cheating. You can't simply glue things together because it's convenient. You can't pretend materials are something they aren't. Construction has to be truthful. The sculpture has to be honest about how it exists.

It makes life difficult sometimes. A bit of superglue would solve all sorts of problems. But the work wouldn't be the same.

Place and Radical Locality

BZ - Much of your work is associated with Harris and the Hebrides. Robert Macfarlane described you as "radically local". How do you understand that relationship with place?

SD - I'm not entirely sure what he meant by it.

I often describe myself as being like a wheelie bin. I don't really belong here, but somehow, I've been accepted.

(BZ - And in the Hebrides, tied down with a rock on top.)

SD – Yeah, exactly! I've lived here for over forty years, although recently I've also spent time working in the south of France. I'm interested to see what happens when I work elsewhere.

The thing about Harris is that the place itself becomes part of the work. Materials are everywhere if you're willing to look for them. You can drag things off the beach. You can find stone, bone, driftwood, whale remains, whatever happens to arrive.

Years ago I heard there was a Viking soapstone quarry somewhere on Harris. While searching for it I was given a geological survey and introduced to a stone called dunite. It's over two billion years old and contains so much iron it's almost magnetic.

I took on a commission, which I thought I'd do in marble. I'd never really worked in stone before, but I’d seen the film with Charlton Heston being Michael Angelo - wack-wacking out marble. I thought ‘it's got to be easy, you know, with a chisel and stuff’. I got these big blocks of marble and it was hopeless. I couldn’t do it; I didn’t have a clue really. Anyway, I got help from a guy who did gravestones. He said to get an angle grinder with a diamond disk. You can do an awful lot with that. After that I got a die grinder and it suddenly started working. That was with marble so I wondered if I could do anything with the dunite? It is harder than Marble, but I actually could work it and it's free, which is very important. I couldn't afford expensive materials. So, the fact that dunite was free mattered. So, I learned how to work it.

That's really been the story of my whole practice. I couldn't afford to pay specialists, so I had to learn things myself. Woodworking. Casting. Stone carving. Metalwork. Preservation techniques.

Everything comes from necessity. Experiment, Chance and Discovery

BZ - Your process sounds incredibly intuitive. Do you draw or plan works in advance?

SD - Not really. Sometimes I draw if I get stuck. But mostly I just go straight in. I’ve got a direction of where I want to be and then it usually changes anyway.

I usually have eight or more works on the go at the same time. Some never get finished. Some sit around for years before I understand what they need.

I once abandoned a stone sculpture because I couldn't make it work. Ten years later I found it again and suddenly understood how to continue it. That's how most of the work happens.

I'm interested in what materials do when they're pushed slightly beyond what they're supposed to do.

I have a small foundry and enjoy experimenting. What happens if molten bronze meets glass? What happens if different materials are combined? It's a kind of alchemy. I might burn myself while I am doing what I am doing.

I visited a bronze foundry in India that had been operating for around fourteen hundred years. They were still casting using mud moulds and dried cow dung. There was virtually no modern equipment. It reminded me that extraordinary things can be made with very little. It made me think you can do that with next to nothing. I thought I would just try it and so far I haven’t lost any fingers.

Stealing from Nature

BZ - Many artists working with landscape describe nature as a collaborator. Is that something that resonates with you?

SD - No.  I steal from nature. I collect things.

Darkness, for example. Here on Harris, we have no street lighting. The darkness is extraordinary. One winter night I made two lead containers and walked into the hills. I sealed darkness inside them.

It's completely absurd, of course.

But the idea made perfect sense to me.

I've also collected calm water, storm water, sand from different countries, whale bones, feathers, all sorts of things. Sometimes these materials become sculptures. Sometimes they simply wait.

A baleen whale once washed up on the shore. In those days you could help yourself. I spent days dragging bones home in a tiny hatchback, driving along with the giant bones sticking out of the back window like something from the Flintstones! The smell was apparently appalling. Fortunately, I have almost no sense of smell.

BZ - Yeah, well, with the materials you're using, it is a big advantage.

SD - Yeah, I mean, MacFarlane, was saying about the smell in the workshop, but more than that is the cold. It's not heated, you know, then it can be a bit tough. A gallery I worked with when they came to visit, they said that it's too hard and most people couldn't cope with it. I did try heating it but you can't heat the place, so what's the point? If you're working with stone, you have to be outside. So, you just dress up.

The Heart of the Thief

One work that feels especially powerful is The Heart of the Thief. That came from being robbed while on holiday in Tobago.

We'd left a few belongings on the beach and returned to find that someone had stolen a watch and a small amount of money.

I was furious.

So, I drew the outline of a human body in the sand and took a handful of sand from where the thief's heart would have been. The strange thing was that as soon as I did it, all the anger disappeared. But I'd taken on a responsibility. I now had to do something with that sand.

Back home I made a human heart from melted coins and placed the sand inside it. I threw away some grains of sand for redemption, you can see how catholic I was! Around it I built a thicket of nails so that it held the heart object in place.

When I finished it the sun hit it and it was really perfect. I knew I would never make another work quite like it.

The final blasphemy was that the sculpture was eventually bought by a banker in Hong Kong. I always found that rather wonderful.

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What emerges from Dilworth's reflections is a practice rooted not just in representation but in embodiment. His sculptures are not symbols of things; they are things. Materials are not selected to illustrate ideas but because they already contain histories, meanings and presences of their own.

Although his work is often framed through mythology, ritual or shamanism, the conversation reveals something more direct. Dilworth's sculptures emerge through sustained encounters with place, materials and making. They are discovered rather than designed, uncovered rather than imposed.

Perhaps the clearest expression of this philosophy comes in his distinction between art that is about something and art that is something. This commitment to material truth has remained constant. Whether working with whale bone, bog oak, stone, bronze, darkness or water, Dilworth continues to create objects that resist explanation and instead ask to be encountered on their own terms.