What you remember about your work being collected by Charles Saatchi and what did it mean to you (and your career) at the time?

AC - The work was in the exhibition 'Wonderful Life' at the Lisson gallery in 1993. He bought a fair amount of work from that show including my 'Secretors' along with my 'The god look alike contest,' which he still has. I think at that particular time there was, for artists, something inevitable about a Saatchi purchase (and the cheap deals he'd strike with the gallery). If you were showing in London he was pretty much the only collector about. I think by 1993 a Saatchi purchase did not have the status attached to it that it had had a few years beforehand, but I was very pleased that he chose my work and the money made a big difference to me - because I had none. It was the first work I had sold, but being in the Saatchi collection itself had little effect on my career, I think.

He didn't ever buy anything else (and other collectors did not follow him) and he has never shown any of the work himself (although was Sensation partly curated by him? I can't remember) although 'The god look alike contest' has remained in his collection and is lent to other exhibitions. He put 'Secretors' into auction and they didn't sell. So they ended up in the Arts Council Collection.

Did you ever meet Charles Saatchi himself when he purchased your work or did it happen through the gallery?

AC - It was always through the gallery. I used to work as technician for a small gallery whose director was a good friend of Saatchi's so I'd been within striking distance of him many times but never had a conversation with him.

Unlike most national collections, having your work purchased by a private collector means that it can sold on or off to other collectors, dealers, galleries etc. What do you recall about your work 'Secretors' being donated from the Saatchi collection to the Arts Council Collection and how did you feel about your work moving collections?

AC - I felt very relieved! I'd heard rumours that a lot of the work Saatchi had bought had ended up drifting into obscure hedge-fund art collection warehouses somewhere in a remote part of Finland, so, yes, especially because 'Secretors' require a lot of thought and organisation to install them and, of course, some cunning as to choosing their location, so I have lot of faith in the Arts Council Collection's ability to honour this. And to offer the works ideal conservation conditions. I think in a private collection they would have ended up, broken, gathering dust on a shelf somewhere.

One of your works (Untitled Stile), had already been purchased by the Arts Council Collection before Saatchi donated your work 'Secretors' in 1999. What was your prior relationship like with the Collection, who purchased your previous work and what do you remember looking back now?

AC - I remember Marjorie Allthorpe Guyton, her partner and children coming on a Sunday to visit my studio which was in a tiny smelly (above a butchers, I think) office in brixton. They made their minds up quite quickly. Perhaps because their children were running round and round the stile dangerously close to it. I was very pleased that it sold to the arts council. I had no idea how I was meant to organise the sale, or what financial value the work should be set at but it all seemed to happen very quickly. Again, I had very little money at the time so financially it made a big difference although in retrospect I sold it very cheaply. I am still useless at pricing my work. I think I had no idea at the time what the Arts Council Collection meant in relation to other public or private collections. Again, in retrospect, I realised the significance of the Collection and also that it allowed the piece to be disseminated to other exhibition contexts very easily. I have no memory as to how it actually went from my studio to the Collection; I had no transport and no possibility of crating it. Maybe I walked it round there in a shopping trolley.

Intimate collections and ephemeral communities are frequently generated through your works, what happens when one collection gives your work to another and why do you think Saatchi donated your work?

AC - I think Saatchi giving the 'Secretors' to the Arts Council is the only instance of this occuring for me. (I'm in a peculiar position of exhibiting constantly but have no gallery dealing with me so therefore, at the moment, I sell very little work). I didn't feel very comfortable in his collection because overall I feel Saatchi's emphasis on the spectacular and superficially 'naughty' over any more profound, less consumable (and indeed more disturbing as a result) notion of what the artwork might be, so, I was relieved when these works entered the Arts Council Collection. I have no idea why he chose to do this and I'm totally ignorant of the economics of this decision. But I was surprised that he thought them worth donating because I felt he wasn't really, interested in my work as a whole. Even in Sensation the other work he owned - The God look alike contest - was relegated to peripheral spaces. However, of course the donation, as a whole, was unique and very generous. Like d'offay's donation, these transferrals of works from private to public collections is fantastic. The public institutions can't possibly afford to own this work without such donations, and once public they are protected, and art history is dependant on this quality of archiving and mediation. Works can disappear from a private collection never to be seen again. Public collections are accountable.

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