The Ugliest Thing I Love: Artist Kate MccGwire on a bizarrely beautiful mould-covered wall

My studio is on a Dutch barge moored to Platts Eyot, one of a series of islands down the Thames. The whole of the island was run by a company called Vosper Thornycroft during the war and the workforce on the island was mainly women making torpedo boats.

Right by my studio there is an absolutely massive shed, maybe the size of two tennis courts, which is completely abandoned now. The wall is half concrete, half corrugated iron, built in 1940 or something like that and really hasn’t had any maintenance done to it since.

The bottom half of the wall is painted black but has grown mould on it and the top half is corrugated iron and is decaying and rusting through, so you get that red, streaky effect.

You could photograph it from 50 different places and you’d get a completely different image every time. It’s constantly changing colour because of the light and depending on the time of the year, so it will go from olive green to lime green to a sort of blue-ish haze. It’s a constantly evolving backdrop.

I see it like a painting but actually it would be incredibly difficult to recreate those textures and colours and not make it look fake.

When I moved onto the island the shed was populated by a massive colony of feral pigeons that would erupt from the building at different stages during the day. They moult twice a year – April and October – and they would leave their feathers for me to collect. That’s how I got into doing what I am doing, so the building is important to me.

Like the pigeon feather itself, the wall has a natural beauty to it. It’s disgusting and dirty and a lot of people would shy away from it and not want to touch it – a pigeon feather has those connotations too. But when you pick up a feather it is so incredibly beautiful and ingenious, it’s an incredible feat of engineering. So I am just constantly marvelling at things that happen in nature I suppose.