EXCERPT ROBIN MACKAY: I’d like to talk about your recent work Exercise (Dunhuang) 2014, but I think it would be useful to go back to some earlier works in order to understand the evolution of the complex relation this work maintains to site—and to ‘plot’ in all of its senses: Plot in the graphic sense, in the sense of unseen conspiracy, and in the sense of the projection of one space into another. You have always spoken about works such as Universal (Kit Carson, Colorado) 2009 and Lufkin (Near Hugo, Colorado), 2009 as being ‘portraits’. What kind of process is involved in creating portraits of these apparently desolate, somewhat dislocated sites? And how you operate a series of transformations to bring them into your work? How do you operate in the landscape in order to create these very sophisticated models, doubles of the real site, in a medium that you’ve made your own? JOHN GERRARD: Typically I will be directed to a referent, a sort of a start point, often on Google Earth or in mainstream media, a newspaper picture for example…