Megan Elliott: Could you tell me a bit about your background and when you started making sculptures?

Millie Layton: I grew up in the suburbs of greater London, near Kingston, which is a commuter town with very little character. People often say its best feature is the shopping. It might be its only feature. People often say, ‘oh isn’t there a John Lewis there?’. Funnily enough, my Dad worked in the John Lewis in Kingston for 20 years. This certainly contributes to a focus in my practice on desire and fantasy, particularly in shopping; I spent a lot of my childhood on the floor of a department store waiting for my Dad to finish work so we could hang out.

I studied my BA in Sculpture and Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art because every artist I liked went there, so I thought it must be good, and it was really far away from Kingston so it ticked that box. It was in my third year of the four-year course that I threw myself into making large scale sculpture. There was a supportive, centralised workshop which allowed the voices on my work to be less conceptual and more practical. This stopped a conceptual paralysis and allowed me to make sculptures about the things I was interested in. I need to make bad sculptures to make good ones. It’s important to know you are bad at things.

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ME: Your work closely examines our relationship with inanimate objects, interrogating how we project our own feelings and experiences onto them – looking around your studio, I can see a whole range of gummy sweets and products that instantly take me back to my childhood. Could you talk a bit more about this in your work, and what you’re working on currently?

ML: My relationship to consumer objects is peculiar; having experienced a lot of death in my family, I have had to clear through a lot of dead people’s possessions and was intrigued by how an object exists differently after someone dies.

How we described my mum’s reading glasses, how my nan’s car would be spoken about. It’s like you fall asleep and they are just dead objects and you wake up and they are completely new things. The language that is also used to describe objects is bleak; boats as women, cars with names. I find it all bizarre.

Yeah, I love sweets. I have a mad sweet tooth and a slightly disgusting obsession with pic ‘n’ mix, I don’t trust people who don’t like sweets. There are a lack of sharp corners on sweets too, so they share some properties of soft sculpture. A childhood fantasy is what intrigues me about sweets. Their promise of happiness. Sweets are an aggressive promise of happiness. I like the utopia of sweets and even the utopia I feel when I eat them. I have a funny relationship to gummy sweets - because my family were Jewish, I was never meant to eat gelatine sweets, so this combination of guilt and pleasure I get every time I eat them turns them into these living breathing edible situations. There’s a naughtiness in the act of eating sweets that’s more universal though, it’s indulgent and delicious and sickening. Eating so many sweets from the corner shop you feel sick. Sweets are small pockets of utopia, a feeling I try and replicate in my work. I recently made a giant wax gummy worm that was eating a smaller real gummy worm sweet, kind of like a bad pseudo-deep ouroboros.

ME: One of the materials you’re using to make these new gummy-snake-like objects, gelatine, appears as though it could be resin. The way in which the material itself masquerades as another seems to bring to be commenting on the falseness or insincerity of objects?

ML: Yeah, definitely. No material can be autonomous but I enjoy using materials that aren’t instantly recognisable or placeable, that could be a lot of different things. I like the pretence, insincerity and the promise of something better that these mystery materials might hold. Using materials masquerading as other materials for me is like a bad magic trick; once you know how it’s done it’s not interesting anymore.