Every culture has beauty and decorations of body. This is not of itself superficial, this is very human. Decorating when it becomes out of balance, when it becomes about the materialism, about how many shoes, how many handbags, how expensive they are, and the status, then it's no longer just about an expression or looking beautiful, that's more about 'I HAVE MONEY, I AM RICH'. It felt out of balance.

We are in this time of corporations being so greedy and global. Some people want to call it the apocalypse. When I was born it was half the people on the planet. It has doubled in my life time. This is not sustainable for the earth; of course we are going somewhere. So we have to live preciously, we have to live each day with care!

As you are working on ideas, you are in a bubble, working on your images. What's important to me in my work, I like this idea of communicating through a piece of art so works don't have to be exchanged. They're okay and they're helpful but most importantly that the image will convey something in my mind that I was trying to communicate and then you have that connection.

I had this duality growing up with my dad being a strict Catholic and his brother being a priest and my mother finding God in nature, so I've taken a little from both [traditions].

I was always painting when I was a kid. But then when I handled a camera when I was 17, that was it for me. I loved photography. I would work 4 or 5 hours a day. It was like a calling.

It's much harder to work for yourself, by yourself, than to create work for a gallery, because there are no limits and you can do anything you want. It's always easier when you have a parameter, when you have a limit. You can work within the limit and push it and walk the line, but when you're given absolutely no limits, it's harder. You must really think. It's more challenging.

My idea was that if I took a picture of somebody and years later, or whenever, they would die and if someone wanted to know who this person was, they could take one of these pictures and it would tell who the person was.