The studio is a place where I can experiment before I'm prepared for an idea to become a body of work, or a new way of working, or a way of working that can sustain me over a period of time.

There was a point in time where the thought of people even talking about me made me anxious. Physically.

There's a magic that comes from playing entirely to who you are. I've got my specialist subject - in the Mastermind sense - and I wouldn't change it, or who I am.

The studio is a laboratory, not a factory. An exhibition is the result of your experiments, but the process is never-ending. So an exhibition is not a conclusion.

In the end, it doesn't really matter what you paint. It's all just a routine to connect yourself finally with other people.

I was listening to a lot of hip hop, music like Public Enemy that was about raising consciousness, and I realised I could feed that directly into my work, using images in a way that was a bit like sampling - taking images from diverse places, exploring the contradictions without trying to hide the seams.

When I left the Royal College, I decided I would only make paintings that I would want to look at myself, that felt close to my life.