Hello, I'm Kirstie Young.

Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island discs from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the Radio broadcast.

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My cast away this week is Damian Hurst, the best known and most successful conceptual artist in the world.

Life, death, desire, fear, beauty, horror.

His creative preoccupations are pretty standard fare. His art, using sharks, maggots, butterflies,

glass for maldehyde, and even sometimes paint, is not.

His best known works have become iconic symbols of contemporary culture and his exhibitions and auctions attract attention in the way that a carcass attracts flies.

Growing up in Leeds, his mum was something of an early artistic influence.

She had dots painted on her front door and whenever little Damian said he'd finished a drawing,

she'd lay another sheet of paper down and tell her son, carry on.

He once said, people don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary.

I'm sure there were people in caves going, I like your cave, but I hate that crap you've got on the wall.

So, Damian Hurst then, let's first of all take a quick talk through some of your best known work and I'd like to go first of all to mother and child divided,

which is a mother and child calf and cow separated in four different cases and you can walk in between them and you can see their innards.

How do you want somebody to feel once they've looked at that piece of art?

I remember seeing a Richard Sarah sculpture. It was like two pieces stood side by side.

I remember walking through the centre of it and thinking, oh my god, this thing could fall on me and kill me.

Thinking that's a great response and a great reaction to a physical reaction to a piece of art.

And then I remember thinking that if you could take a walk through a cow, you could get that same sort of shock.

You can't help but walk in and then once you get in you kind of want to get out.

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