Arts Preview: Marc Quinn takes a bough for “Held By Desire” exhibition

The inspiration for Marc Quinn's titular piece at his White Cube show, "Held by Desire", stems from a visit to London's Chelsea Flower Show in May. After he bought the gold medal-winning bonsai tree at the event, the 49-year-old British artist scanned the 250-year-old plant with a high-definition 3-D printer, made a model of it and then cast it into a lacquered bronze sculpture.

Quinn is fascinated by the dynamic relationship between man and nature, and how the latter is always ready to reclaim its rightful place. "If you take the bonsai tree out of its bowl and plant it in the ground, it'll grow back to the way it wants to be," he says. "The bonsai is very much a reflection of the whole way that we're involved with nature: we want to control it and shape it to our desire. We want it to be this perfectly controlled thing."

The eclectic works in his exhibition are all connected by the idea that our relationships with others, with nature and the planet are governed by our subconscious. "It's all about the desire to eat, to love, to kill and to reproduce," he says.

The admiration and imitation of nature's beauty through art, he says, is another theme of the exhibition, which also showcases some of his large shell and orchid sculptures in bronze, as well as several from his Flesh Painting series of photorealist oil-on-canvas paintings of raw meat - one of which, under the title Past, Present and Future, features a naked and very pregnant Lara Stone.