Can you tell us about your life? What drove you to become an artist? 

I was born with the Art Bug. It started small – drawings and gifts for family and friends – now my life is art and my art is my life. It includes all my favourite things: desires, dreams, conversations, debates, parties, a disregard for rules, generosity, community, talent, love. Art is a disease and a cure. As Maria Lassnig said: “Living with art stops one wilting!”

What is your relation to pain and danger? How do you position yourself as an artist with these core thematics? 

I love the kick of a thrill but I don’t lust after pain. Many of my pieces are an attempt to work through trauma or injustice, agitations, restlessness, perhaps feelings of wrongness, but I think they flip as much into ecstasy and revelry as pain, and are as much about healing as touching a wound. 

I guess your work has been censored a lot. How do you deal with it? 

There’s often been a reaction of unease. Walking out, fainting, or straight up rejection. But mostly I feel lucky enough to say my work is welcomed. People love to be confronted with their fears. I dig out the repressed, touch the goo in the stomach. There have been a couple of instances of censorship. It sucks but art is treading a very fragile ground right now of having to behave too nicely. I never got into art to be polite, quite the opposite. We need spaces to express difficult subjects. 

Your work “The Severed Tail” is on display at the Venice Biennale; it explores relationships between humans and non-humans in a fetish world. Is it a work that you specifically produced for the Biennale? How do you consider the specific public of a significant event like that? Could you expand on the narrative of this work?