‘It was quite obviously breathing’: the day Anthony McCall realised his light sculptures were alive

He made his name with exhilarating ‘light sculptures’ that audiences could spend hours inside. But a show in excessively hygienic Sweden led to 20 years in the wilderness. As McCall returns, he relives a pioneering careerAt the beginning of 1973, Anthony McCall, sculptor of light, was 26 and had made waves with his first piece, Landscape for Fire. This was a film of a performance in which white-clad spectres light fires across a huge landscape, experimenting with McCall’s belie