Hanging Axe was part of a series of hanging sculptures I made in the 1990s. It was inspired by both the shape of the quarry boulder of Purbeck marble I bought and Palaeolithic stone axes. The sculpture is meant to be both beautiful and threatening., with echoes of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum. However, like ancient weapons in museums the danger is dissipated. I was happy to come across Mike Heizer’s Axe head at the De Menil Foundation in Houston in 2000. I worked for Heizer in 1981 at a studio in P.S.1 on a photo montage project.