The following conversation between Bettina Buck and Vincent Honoré, curator of the David Roberts Art Foundation, London, took place in May 2008 in the artistís studio.

Vincent Honoré: For your first solo exhibition in London, you are premiering an impressive body of new sculptures and 2-D works. The works are experimenting with the limits of their perception in many ways: playing with the notion of sculpture as a monument (Fallen), perverting the structural qualities inherited from antique (Fallen), classical, baroque (Grotto), minimal (Plinth) sculptures, infusing tensions and even contradictions in the used materials or between forms and titles. You even disrupt the display, playing with the hanging of the works by carefully unsettling the physical encounter with the exhibited items (hanging works on the ceiling, or slightly below eye-level). It seems like you ask the viewer for an active (visual, physical, conceptual) involvement with the work. Where do you situate your practice, among the lines of sculpture, installation and "situation"? Bettina Buck: Right now I'm interested in sculpture, in its nature and mutation. I'm a little wary of the term installation as I feel it can sometimes be used as a way to iron out differences between things. For me the term becomes relevant when the work is actually being installed for exhibition. Once installed then the different sculptures create a situation, begin a conversation even if it often takes place in a kind of broken or less than fluent language or dialect. The stresses, tensions and alliances within each individual piece of work are hopefully mirrored in the conversations and relationships between the works collectively. It's crucial at this point how the work finds its place as an independent character within a space. With regards to what you describe as the viewers "active (visual, physical, conceptual) involvement with the work" I agree that the work operates on different levels of involvement with each piece having a slightly different emphasis and tone as well as its own space and identity. VH: Your sculptural practice is firmly anti-Modernist and you favour assemblages, collages and reconfigurations of existing, mundane and at-hand (often found) materials, recycling industrial or industrially produced materials. These materials accompany a practice, which explores the limits of the form, and even at times flirts with the formless (Phift, Rabbit Ears). The use of unfired clay, artificial fur, artificial hair, patterned fabric, foam, metal pipe recalls a history of "eccentric" sculptures from Kurt Schwitters (Grotto as a mini Merzbau), Louise Bourgeois (the Hanging Mountain (her Landscapes from the 60s), Claes Oldenburg (T.I.T. / his soft objects), etc., as much as it situates your work within contemporary re-interpretation of the sculptural techniques (as seen in the exhibition Unmonumental at the New Museum last year, in particular the works by Rachel Harrison). How do you situate yourself? BB: I'm inspired by the endless cacophony around us, by familiar moments and casual encounters, whether this be a dried up spider in the corner of the studio, a piece of architecture or an historic event. These are moments, which can be edited, and re-edited and provisionally transformed into an imaginative encounter, a stage, a space made to collapse, before being returned to the general cacophony. While some of the artists from previous generations are obviously important to me as a point of reference, I discover that more and more there are a group of contemporary artists (Cosima von Bonin, Rachel Harrison, Ian Kaier, etc) who share a common interest in material and stuff in the world and in ways of combining this, who seek to deliberately create tensions and disruptions within the work, who search for what simultaneously attracts and alienates the viewer, for work which raises questions rather than presents answers, which makes associations rather than making things clear. VH: You staged performances, in the early years of your career, and you're, currently collaborating with the dance-theatre group Mouvoir, having designed the set (for Beautiful Me and Cactus Bar). The performative elements seem to be crucial in your sculptures, as the happening was for Claes Oldenburgís early works. How do you consider performance and how do you link it to sculpture? BB: I originally studied at the Academy of Media Arts, Cologne. During that period I trained to conceive of and understand "situations" or Mise en scène through the use of video, photography and the performing arts. And while I initially fought with and tried to move away from this training Iíve now begun to understand it as an integral part of how I work as an artist and how I approach and make sculpture. Back then I often thought of myself as protagonist in the work but I now understand myself more as a director and the individual pieces of sculpture as protagonists or actors to whom I give certain stage directions. During the last two years I revived my collaboration through Mouvoir with artists from different fields and enjoyed the challenge and different ways of working and thinking which came with this. I liked those moments when we were all on stage, equally present in developing something, which initially began as a sketch, something mutant. This collaborative work provides another kind of setting and challenge in working to a brief and developing something, which sits oddly as dance, theatre, performance or sculpture. These colliding views also allow me to reflect on my own studio work because I get to practice a different kind of language. VH: The work had always resisted abstraction. If not in their form, at least in their titles. However, with No Title, you obviously create an abstract work, and the title does not give any hint of how to interpret it. What is your relationship with abstraction and why this work? BB: No Title isn't looking or waiting for a title, as it is not untitled ... It is also not so much an abstract work but maybe more like a representation of an abstract work. No Title is the kind of "exception" I'm always looking for, so that it is recognisable as my work but also somehow shifts the perception of it. I think there are clear associations with certain kinds of Abstract, Minimalist and Process work here and in this sense the durational aspect of the work is very important, how it can transform physically and conceptually over time and how a certain kind of provisionality becomes consolidated through this process. VH: Humour and absurdity are evidently crucial to the work: plays of words, contradictions between titles and forms, tensions between shapes, objects misplaced, displaced, irony with high-culture, parody, etc. BB: I think the work doesnít work when it's self-consciously or deliberately trying to be humorous or absurd but very much happens along the way so to speak. In other words I begin working with something then there's the frustration and out of the frustration with the frustration hopefully comes the humour and absurdity. VH: You once mentioned your sculptures as "monsters" and said this concept was quite important (Roquefort). The English word monster can be traced back to various etymological roots. The Latin 'monstrum' means 'that which teaches', and there is also another connection to 'monstrare', to show. In biology, the word monster may be used to describe an organism that is grossly abnormal or deformed. Similarly, when used in other contexts, we find that 'monstrous' entities also tend to be somehow 'beyond the norm' in appearance or behaviour, crossing the boundaries of acceptability, manifesting traits alien to the natural order or outside of 'normal' consensus reality. We often find monsters having hybrid form. We may also find that mythological monsters exist by virtue of some kind of transformation. It then seems like your sculptures indeed are real monsters, aren't they? BB: Some of them are monsters and yes I'm interested in the concept of the monster and its etymology but without wanting to make this too explicit or literal in the work, I'm also interested in associated ideas of abnormality, deformity, hybridity and what you describe as entities "beyond the norm". Where I understand this concept to operate within the work is maybe through the opposing materials and associations out of which the work and engagement with it are generated. These are very interesting moments, moments where there is some movement, some struggle, moments where something happens.