Eduard Bersudsky about his works:

	As a child I lived in St.Petersburg (then Leningrad) on the corner of Dostoevsky and Svechnoy Pereulok (Candle Wynd). There were often beggars in the doorways. They had accordions and as soon as they started playing, everybody would open their windows, watch them, then wrap money up in bits of paper, as much as they could, and throw it down and the children who were with the beggars would look for it. Everyone would point and shout: "There is some, over there'. It was the time of the post-war collapse. We had to survive. For some reason I remember a man in a hat. He had a box and on it was a guinea pig and in front of the guinea pig was another small box. The man would take money from passers-by and tell the guinea pig: "Come on, Mashka, look for it". It would bend its head and from the box take out a piece of paper on which was written the fate that awaited the person. One of my first childhood memories is of our communal kitchen, full of smoke from the oil stove where someone was cooking something, a neighbour was rubbing kerosene into her daughter's hair to kill off the lice, another was washing her feet in a basin and third was putting tin on a saucepan and soldering it. A forth banged his fist on the door of the toilet, thinking correctly that it was his turn for a bit of solitude and peaceful thoughts. I found a box with holes in the sides for ventilation, stuck noses onto walnut shells, pushed my fingers through the holes and put the shells on my fingers. By moving my fingers I could create the illusion of a group of people having a lively conversation. I must have been about eight years old, but cannot now remember the conversations we had on that stage, although they were often interrupted by my mother or brother. Fifty years have passed almost unnoticed since then. I am still playing with my theatre. Only the box has grown to the size of the Royal Museum in Edinburgh - oh, and the walnuts have grown too!
	It all started when I left the army. I wasn't married, and was living alone and working in a sculpture studio. We sculpted nude women, we sculpted portraits. Then I get fed up with reproducing what I saw. I prefer to use my imagination, to think up forms and images and to try to reproduce what was born in my head.
	Then an unexpected opportunity turned up to get a job for the Park Department - to carve bears, lions and other animals in wood for the town parks. It is not a simple job to shape a log, to make it alive. I did that for about ten years: wood - axe, axe - wood. I made various wooden sculptures but now hardly any of them are left, nearly all have rotted.
	I still keep the first kinemat I made - a man with organ-grinder. When I fixed up the motor and it suddenly started moving its hand, I jumped back about three metres and watched it: it was moving by itself. It is impossible to put this feeling into words. I made a lot of other things, various people came to see me, saw what I was doing, told others and they started coming.
	Sometimes I have this nightmare: I'm in a camp, in some sort of ghetto, in a small room, and tomorrow I am going to be tortured and then chased to some enormous ditch where I'll be shot at with machine guns. The Castle, or 1937 ( the year of the most cruel of Stalin's repressions) I made when thoughts were going round and round in my head about twenty million people dying for nothing. I feel sorry for these people, why do I live and they .. ? Why, for example is Mandelshtam lying under the ground. He would have been able to tell this world a lot more, but for some reason they took him like a mere cockroach and squashed him. And who did this? People who are not even worth his little finger. I remembered Kafka - his machine with needles. A person was put into this machine and it would lay out on his back some sort of writing, then it would write on his chest. He jerked around from the needles but the machine continued to write on him.
	The first place I exhibited was in somebody's flat. It belonged to a blessed man - poet Constantin Kuzminsky. He was always lying under an animal skin and drank the whole time. He warmed me, said I could exhibit in his flat...But soon he emigrated to America.
	Fifteen years later somebody brought Tatiana Jakovskaya to my place. She looked at my works and got an idea how to take them outside. She obtained a hall from the district council, equipped an auditorium and the Barrel-Organ Theatre, Sharmanka, was born.
	Then in 1990 Maggy and Tim Stead came to the theatre - and stayed for good, helping us to survive - first in Russia and then in Scotland. Tim and I conversed through interjections and pauses - I have still not learnt English and he hadn't the time to learn Russian. But it was enough for us. You could sigh or laugh at one side of a table and the chap at the other side knew exactly why you sighed or why you laughed. Tragically he died few month after we finished our first - and last mutual project - the Millennium Clock - but I still hear his laugh. Tim' s sculptures breathe - they will live for many years to come. Before our eyes Maggy has developed into a veritable artist. She draws as she lives - intelligently, absolutely improvising on the spur of the moment.
	Our world is full of life thanks to crazy people and it is my fate that these kind of people play a big part in my life. I'm very grateful to these people - and first of all to Julian Spalding, former Director of Glasgow Museums, who was absolutely crazy, having the courage and nerve to take the risk to buy my machines for Glasgow Museums. It looks like from time to time the right person somehow arrived at the right time to bring it to the other right place. Maybe tomorrow some alien will appear and bring it and me to another planet. 1 would not protest. For me it does not matter where I work. What matters - is to work.
	In the summer of 1999 I carved these twelve figures for the Millennium Clock with enormous speed and with frightening unexpectedness. At least - it wasn't me who made them. I only led them into existence. I was helped by the builders of Chartres, Rheims and Strasbourg as well as by the Orkney Standing Stones. To make it took eight weeks and all my previous life in Russia.

	I love living in Scotland. Wild nature gives me small moments of peace and quietness, I love water and pines over water, and mountains, the combination is important.
	The friend of mine, artist Henry Elinson, has a motto: "artist has to feed his eyes". I am often feeding mine with works of those, whose names we do not even know - say, masters who carved the amazing creatures out of pink marble at the Priory of Serrabona 900 years ago.
	When I am asked where ideas come from I can only say - from heaven. I have a feeling that it is not me who makes the kinemats, they make themselves, I just help them. I do it for my own entertainment. I just retire into myself and then everything beyond the windows is not frightening wherever I live ... If someone were to take this away from me, 1 would go mad. But I do not care what happened to them. If for example a bomb were thrown in or a man came with a large axe and destroyed everything, I wouldn't be upset. Because, as the saying goes, I had my kicks, I lived through them and at that moment wasn't thinking about any shit. This is my life and it's my toy and it keeps me away from the material world.