Sculptor Marc Quinn: 'Have I mellowed and joined the establishment? No!'

Marc Quinn, once perhaps the most shocking Young British Artist, is adamant he hasn’t mellowed with age. Quinn, who helped kick off the roaring Nineties with a disturbing bust of his head made with 10 pints of his own blood, is this weekend opening a new show at that hallowed idyll of English pleasantry, Kew Gardens. But when I ask if the collaboration shows he has joined the establishment, he quickly says no.

For evidence Quinn, 60, points to a bunch of flowers cast in animal blood he’s taking along to Kew, and says the natural world is not gentle, but red in tooth and claw. “I think that nature is beautiful and disturbing,” he says. “If you just let go of a city, it gets engulfed in plants and falls apart. Nature is a kind of relentless machine that consumes… there’s something