Thomas Duggan was one of the most brilliant minds I have encountered. He had an enormous capacity for invention, and dynamic creation. He was a sculptor, a designer, an artist, a writer, an architect and a craftsman. He was my only constant collaborator from my schooldays, where I was not at all a creative person. In a true sense then, Tom was an enormous influence on me, conceptually and modally and this was absolutely true during the dozens of things we made together. I’m sure he was an influence on hundreds of people around the world, such was his generosity.

Throughout my adult life, Tom offered me a constant example of possibility. But it then must be said many of the things Tom did were not possible for me, as they would not be for most people. For example, he one day told me he had convinced the kuka robot company to drop off a robot at his studio, then he taught himself how to use it from the instructional manual, and then did so, with the safety barriers removed because they were getting in his way. He would build a piece of furniture for a friend, from scratch, on the same day he would be working with his friends at MIT on synthetic silk design and meeting with aerospace companies. Tom had an enormous capacity for brilliance when he found a direction or idea that consumed him, and though introspective, he was ever dynamic, and original.

Our collaborations were constant and ranging from the time I started to write seriously, in between his various and unpredictable projects. Tom was cinematographer on my first attempt at film, and we finished a short film together - Here You Were Never a Child - that was screened at the Toronto, Montreal and Auckland film festivals. He printed poems I wrote for him in both gold and synthetic silk, with the latter exhibited in this video at the V&A and in his exhibition at Tate St Ives. We wrote an article about that work for Nature too, spending time in Devon together drafting and editing, as we often did.

He built the set for my play Mayakovsky in 2017 and that was a magic summer with him in London where we did a performance entitled Ash that was scored by The Dirty Three, whom he knew. The same summer he contributed to an exhibition I ran by bringing live snails into the galleries to eat people’s pieces.

That someone with Tom's force of life is no longer with us seems contrary to sense. He has gone at 41 years of age and for 29 of them he was my friend. He was man of exceptional presence, character, utility, and pragmatism. He had such immediacy, and intensity and yet he was very funny, very drole. He was a really wonderful person to spend hours with, share a meal with, interesting and interested. He was an intellectually and emotionally ambitious man. He lived an amazing life, had such an abundance of friends from across the world, and where he was from. The things he did were consistently extraordinary, and I believe he used his time as we're supposed to. It is a bit paltry in the aftermath of this news, but I feel a great sense the legacy of his work should be shared, and preserved, so please do visit his website and look through just a glimpse of what he made https://thomasdugganstudio.com/