Using ceramics, stainless steel, and wood, 1987 Turner Prize winner Richard Deacon makes monumental sculptures that explore the nature of opposites. Deacon questions essential yet contradictory characteristics: rigidity and strength, the organic and the geometric, grace and awkwardness. “What seems to me particularly interesting in the rolling, twisting, bending operations with material [is] that the enclosure or volume created [has] nothing to do with weight or mass,” Deacon explains. “It is empty and therefore connected to meaning in a way that is independent of causality or rationality (that is to say that the outside is not caused by the inside).” Considered one of the most important living British artists, in 1999 Deacon was named a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.