Stanley Donwood

Asked what he carries, Stanley Donwood says his keys, and then mourns a very small hagstone he used to wear. He found it while making the pictures now hanging in the gallery, and lost it when the string broke.

The gallery is showing StrangeNESS, drawings made for Ness, his book with Robert Macfarlane, and the interview is a run of small questions with no record in sight. Asked about his verbal habits, he says he swears far too much, mostly out of a permanent, staggered disbelief at whatever he is being told.

The first artwork he bought was in Rotterdam in about 2007, a large photograph of three dead rats in various stages of decomposition, which he reads as a metaphor for the end stage of Western capitalism.

His day had been an hour and a half running through the suburbs of Brighton, a nap, and then the studio, to carry on with landscapes he calls a pop art blend of cartography and topography, concentrating on the sacred sites of the British Isles.

He calls himself, without embarrassment, a massive hippie, and has a traveller past to go with it.