Emma Dipper 1977 Tate. © The artist, Barford Sculptures Ltd.

Transcript: Emma Dipper, 1977

Well, there was a real reason for Emma Dipper being like it was.

[Montage of Anthony Caro installing Emma Dipper at Tate Britain]

“Well, I think that that could come round.”
“Yeah, yeah. Clockwise, a little bit.”
“Yeah. Same as it is, just clockwise. Because otherwise you just get so strongly that window at you.”
 

[Anthony Caro in interview]

I had accepted this invitation to go and work at Emma Lake, which is…it's a sort of camp place, on a lake, with a lot of trees around it. Coniferous trees.
 

[Montage of Anthony Caro installing Emma Dipper at Tate Britain]

“Can we just try a little fraction, please, but not very much?"
“The angle's great, the angle's very good.”
 

[Anthony Caro in interview]

Very isolated. 200 miles north of Saskatoon. They said would you like to go and make sculptures there. Sure I would. What am I going to do? I remembered the morning before I caught the plane saying “What should I do, Lal?” to my wife, and she said “Well, it's not going to be easy for you to get steel, you'd better work in something light. You'd better work in something that can easily be obtained up there.” I mean, you could go up there with your lorry and fill up the truck with bits of thin, linear stuff whereas you couldn't really have put the heavy stuff in there. So that was the reason. I mean it was no different reason from working in Toronto in the factory where they had plenty of these things and they could easily lift a couple of tonnes. You couldn't have done that in Emma Lake because we just had the little hi up crane on the back of the truck.

But once you've got it then you start to say "Well, wait a minute. What are we going to do with it?" and you find yourself emptying out the middle of it. So that's really how it happened.