In 1986, when Jim Hodges had just graduated from art school, he regularly destroyed his own finished works.

The materials he used then — mainly dirt and dust — were throwaways anyway. But these ritual mutilations, he said, reflected “a punk attitude of destruction, a kind of anarchist approach to things.” They were also the artist’s complex response to the threat of AIDS, he said, and the real life and death context he felt he was very much in. – By Dorothy Spears

See more of Jim Hodges’s recent artworks here.