HOWZAT

Quinn’s most famous work is his sculpture of the pregnant Alison Lapper, a woman with no arms and shortened legs due to a chromosomal condition, which stood in Trafalgar Square for 20 months. It delighted the disabled lobby and dismayed traditionalists, who accused Quinn of left-wing sentimentality, didactism or exploitation. One critic compared it unflatteringly to a bar of soap on the Today programme, but the public seemed to like it. “Even people who were sceptical came round to it,” Quinn says. “It did all the things I wanted it to do.”

This piece, in turn, inspired his sculptures of Kate Moss in knotted yoga poses. “Kate Moss is this image of what’s supposedly the perfect looking person and yet the image that’s multiplied everywhere is one that not even she can live up to, let alone everybody else.” This year he will unveil Siren at the British Museum, a solid gold version of one of the Kate Moss sculptures, which will cost £1.5 million to make. Most tellingly, while Kate Moss is selling, the Lapper has yet to find a home and is due to go on tour, possibly to India. “It just shows, whatever people say, they prefer a more beautiful image to a more challenging one.”

I think it’s impossible to enjoy Quinn’s work in isolation, and that’s why I’ve left what is in his new show until last. There are huge, bright paintings of flowers that in nature could never grow together; more flowers, this time cast in bronze, strange hybrid plants, from which dangle orchid flowers, tomatoes and apples, and then finished to resemble something plucked out of an oil slick. “They’re all flowers bought in the shop on the same day,” he explains. “So it’s this idea that seasons don’t exist, that human desire has made things available at all times of the year.”

At home Quinn eats organic and GM-free food. Is his work intended as a warning? “No, I don’t want to be moral,” he says. “I’m anxious for humans but not for nature. Because I think nature will always work out in some way.”

The show’s centrepiece are nine enormous pink marble statues of the human embryo as it charts its course from conception to birth. “I was interested in the whole morphology of all our bodies and having made sculptures of people like Alison Lapper, and people looking at it and thinking she’s got a very different sort of a body, I was thinking, well, every single person who’s looking at that has looked much stranger and more different.

“What’s interesting to me is when matter becomes alive. In a way it’s the opposite of death, where somebody dies, they go wherever they go and you don’t know. In the beginning you’ve got the sperm and the egg and suddenly, nine months later, there’s a human being. That evolution of life from matter is what I’ve always found fascinating.”

I’m not sure if they work on their own but these pieces are part of a natural progression. If you’ve seen Quinn’s genomic portrait of the genetic scientist Sir John Sulston, for example, or if you’ve looked at the blood heads and the Alison Lappers, you’ll see a strong pattern emerging. Then you might start to disagree with the Graham-Dixons of this world or the people at Cambridge who wrote him off as insane.

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