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‘The Eternity Chamber is a contrivance of the Cult of the Gulls, and is essentially a time machine. It cannot transport you in time, but shows time stretching out in all directions. The origins of the cult are as follows: a young man whilst walking along a shore was waylaid by a seagull, who alighted on a rock and addressed the man in the form of a poetic riddle, before peeling off into a stormy sky. The man was rendered insane both by the phenomenon of the talking bird and the revelation it imparted. Hoping that the bird would return and elaborate, the man made himself a home in a derelict boat shed, and could be seen stalking the shore day and night, muttering to himself. He became a fixture along that part of the coast, and an object of ridicule for the locals.

However, there was one young lady who saw a fascination in him, and got to know him, as best as that is possible. Gradually, from the bytes of lucidity that interloped his ranting she was able to piece together what it was that she believed the bird had said to him. This document became known as the Testimony of Minuso, for it was nicely written and attracted attention and a following, and soon the following organized itself into a cult. The cult grew, and a wooden and corrugated iron edifice emerged somewhere near the site of the epiphany. This was later replaced by a large stone tower and various outbuildings.

At the centre of the cult, and oblivious to his role, the old man continued to drift around. He became older and older and although he became very decrepit, he just did not die. Some members of the cult began to attribute his longevity to his having witnessed eternity, which is when they decided to construct the Eternity Chamber, with a view to emulating his experience. The chamber is essentially a hexagonal prism about 8ft high, and 5.5ft across. The interior is mirrored on all sides and reflects the floor and ceiling design, a tessellation of coloured equilateral triangles, into eternity. The chamber is mounted on six cast iron feet and is topped by a bronze dome, which supports a globe of the world where all this transpires, atop which a full-size bronze seagull alights.

The exterior of the chamber is a series of relief panels of gulls disporting themselves in various ways. The Eternity Chamber itself will be on display in Lyon, although padlocked shut, to the extent that the door may be opened only a few inches to allow a glimpse of eternity, lest the punters climb in and render themselves mad. It will be accompanied by some drawings, the Testimony of Minuso, and what is alleged to be the skull of the bird that spoke to the man.’

‘As far as I am concerned, the selling of the artwork is a means for me to fund my dreaming. It is essential to here assert the difference between ‘art’ and the artwork, or artefact. Art is not, as is commonly held, the aggregate of objects held to be art by one or more persons, but, I think, much more usefully described as a quality. A thing may have the quality of ‘artiness’ just as banana might have the quality of being yellow, and even if said object has such a quality, it is by no means guaranteed that it will retain it, just as the banana will not remain yellow.

The concept of art is a universal; the artwork is an object that has that quality. When I sell an artwork, what I am doing is going on a journey to my world and bringing back, in the form of certain objects, bounty with which to fund my next, hopefully more intrepid return to that world. For example, on the island, there is a brand of picked eggs, called “Henderson’s”, a delicacy to which the natives are completely addicted and which the colonists use to keep them subjugated. At great expense and personal danger, as my little boat was quite overloaded, I managed to acquire four boxes of these eggs, amounting to 24 jars, which I intend to sell at a considerable premium. An advertisement for these eggs features on the gable-end of one of the buildings in the market scene. I see the drawings in quite a photographic sense, being reportage of life there – again the sale of which allows me to explore the Island in greater detail. The idea of commerce, and the idea that the artist acts as a merchant between the conceptual world and the “real” world runs right through this drawing and the whole project. In fact it is axiomatic.’

‘The land can never reveal its totality, but I can produce a detailed enough survey that will compel others to explore that world on their own terms. Every day my knowledge of the place becomes more detailed, and the better it becomes the more time I spend there. I am sure I will end up retiring there. I still don’t know if the conclusion of the project is coterminous with the end of my life.’

‘I have thought a lot about this. One has to careful, because there is a limited amount of time, and an unlimited amount of potential expansion. There are certain strategies I have to lend the project maximum verisimilitude. Firstly, I am slowly constructing, with the help of my assistant Ben who is a whiz on a program called Lightwave (used by the film industry for building virtual sets), a physical 3D map of the world, so that I might navigate it freely. This model is not intended as an artwork, but as a tool for me to use, so that when I draw a view from one part of the island, it will be exactly coherent with a view from another part of the island – that is to say, all of the mountains will be in the right place.

If somebody very clever wanted to, they could infer from all my drawings the rough shape and dimensions of the world without having seen the model. We will go further and build the town and all other permanent features, including the fixed Gods. This internal coherence, both on a physical and logical sense, I feel is essential to the credibility of the project. In terms of detail, I will use the device of describing certain features in fastidious detail, but leaving swathes of the island lightly outlined.

There are countries in our own world which for me are shapes on a map, or less – just a name. There are huge cities in China which I have never heard of, and yet I have an intimate knowledge of cracks in the tiles that line my bath. To answer your more specific questions, there is unit of exchange, but it does not have a name, because it does not need one, just as the Island does not have a name because everything else relates to it, and is named in accordance. There is simply exchange, and the unit is 1. As for who’s in charge, there will be some sort of government, probably of a Machiavellian variety. There will be government buildings described, although they will be occluded, as is my general understanding of politics. But it is all underwritten by my sincere declaration as to the reality of this place, completely free of any irony.’

‘There is no narrative progression to the project, although there is narrative in the form of myth; that is to say, that certain beliefs of the Islanders are explained by myths. I say myths, rather than historical events, because they are not located in any particular time, and they are self-contained. There are also certain live or active myths concerning the Gods, amongst others. What I am doing is to create a lot of distinct objects and events, and stories, which can be connected in a multitude of ways. Although their spatial location may well be set in terms of the island, their temporal location is not.

As to the linearity of time, the Islanders’ views on this subject are as varied as our own. The incomers, or colonists, largely sustain the received view of time in our own world, which is that of a linear, one-directional and eternal sequence. A lot can be learned about the natives’ cosmology, and hence their view of time, by studying what survives of their language, which is called “Iffenish”. Iffenish does not, for example, distinguish between past and future, but uses a word ‘farish’, meaning distant or remote. Nor does it make any distinction between space and time, which is called ‘aon’ and also happens to be the word for “1” and “it”.

Whereas seeing the future might be seen as some supernatural ability to us, the Islanders regard seeing through time as being as elementary as seeing though space, because they do not divide the two. The more imminent an event, the more predictable it becomes, just as we may view an object more clearly when it is near us. One is much more likely to be able to correctly predict the outcome of a football match five minutes before the final whistle than at the start of the match. I personally take a pretty dim view of the idea of linear time and three dimensional space – it seems nonsensical and curiously unimaginative, except on the part of the person who thought it up.’

‘That sounds like a grand claim made while drunk! The Islanders is a philosophical quest and so to that extent, yes, that would be the aim. I am already quite sure of the axioms of my philosophical system, and that it has a positive outcome. How I will persuade other people of the validity of those axioms is another matter. The prospect of death still scares me, but then it only takes a few seconds thinking about the alternative, i.e. eternity, for one to realize that neither option is too palatable.

There is a third way, though. I think that a lot of the ideas that we hold as self evident are not, but are merely inculcated by relentless repetition, for instance, the whole time business. Our language describes so much the way we think, but if one gets down to the root of matters one can invent new ways of looking at the world which change nothing but change everything.’