Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

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Radio 4. My castaway this week is Mary Portis. She has made an art form out of turning heads and

her galleries have been the enormous plate glass windows of Harrod's top shop and Harvey Nichols.

She put pop bands in the windows, built an enormous fish from baked bean cans,

and most radically of all one Christmas, stripped out the displays and announced the money saved was being given to charity.

If her designs are theatrical, it's little wonder.

Her first ambitions were for the stage, but family tragedy intervened and she was forced to abandon her place at Radha.

After both her parents died when she was a teenager, she was left in sole charge of her younger brother with scant income and nowhere to live.

I had no money and no home, but in some ways it was the making of me, she says.

I went into the driving seat and never left it.

So Mary Portis, you're someone who is very comfortable in the driving seat then.

Yes. That's where you belong.

How do you feel when you're sitting in the driving seat?

Funly enough as I get older, more confident.

It's not a control thing.

I genuinely don't think it is a control thing.

It just feels natural and it feels warm and I enjoy it.

But I like other people in the car with me.

And how are you as a passenger?

I either let go completely.

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