What are these – coconuts or what? he asked nervously

“What are these – coconuts or what?” he asked nervously.”It’s elephant dung,” said Ofili.”At least it doesn’t smell,” came the response.”Yeah, it’s like a resin,” explained Ofili “I seal it.”Tiswas plucked up courage to tap the turds “I like the pictures, too,” he enthused. Tiswas, when the picture was handed over, initially failed to recognise it. He discovered dung in Zimbabwe, and, he has said, “somehow found it inspiring”. “If people see a painting that is six foot by three foot, light blue with a green stripe down the middle, they don’t ask ‘Why is it light blue?’ In the programme, while making the picture, he adds: “People say, ‘I really like your pictures but I wish they didn’t have elephant dung on.’ That’s like saying, ‘It’s not that I don’t find you beautiful, I just don’t like your face’.”Ofili, 29, born in Manchester to Nigerian parents, studied at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College; he has won various prizes, and exhibited solo in New York and London Eleven of his works are in the Saatchi Collection. “I’m not going to go into why I use elephant shit because I can’t be bothered,” he says calmly. For Tiswas is made from polyester resin, with the faces of hip-hop artists cut out from magazines – the Notorious BIG, Dr Dre, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Tupac Shakur. Plus a couple of resin-coated elephant turds – Ofili’s signature touch.

A similar piece would cost pounds 5-pounds 6,000 to buy; this time he was working for free. The Notorious BIG’s album Ready to Die is an incredible chart of a man’s life – it begins with his birth, you hear his mother giving birth, and it goes through the decades. He ends up in prison, and the album goes on about robbing and killing, and he’s thinking about suicide. Then on his second album, Life After Death, he’s becoming a nicer guy And that’s just one hip-hop artist.

There are others who shed light on the ideas of stereotype, fiction and fact.”His painting, For Tiswas, took around six weeks of work. There is an atmosphere in there – you are aware that there is always the potential for something nasty to happen. “I was keen to see what the prison environment was like because I thought it would affect my understanding of hip-hop life And it’s horrible It really is oppressive. You go through door after door after door and they are all locked behind you.”Ofili says that the two mens’ shared passion for hip-hop was the driving force behind the work “The project for me was more related to the musical context. I had these ideas of what prison might be like – full of thugs Well, it might be, but he’s not one,” says Ofili.

Ofili changed his mind while listening to hip-hop on the radio. “It was a programme I listen to regularly, and they play dedications to people in prison, and I started thinking about that. So the BBC put up signs in a few prisons asking if anyone listened to the same station, and three people responded. One had murdered his girlfriend, one was in for hotel fraud – the BBC wanted him because he was very talkative – and one had done burglary. I wanted him.”
Which is how Chris Ofili met Anthony “Tiswas” Ismond, a prisoner in Wormwood Scrubs, and created a painting for him “He was a nice, regular guy. Unlike many of his followers, he never underestimated the power of the free market.

“The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarcely 100 years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together,” he wrote. Moreover, this unprecedented productive spurt, otherwise known as the industrial revolution, was not confined to any one country, since the ever-present need for new markets “chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe”. Wherever the bourgeoisie go, Marx said, they undermine traditional ways of doing things. “All old established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed,” he wrote. “They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life-and-death question for all civilised nations.” It wasn’t just local businesses that suffered.