I am a serious artist in my own right, in the sense that I've spent my entire life being an artist and trying to be an artist and making work.

I never sat down and decided to make work about life and death. It just all comes out of my head like water pouring out of a jug.

I guess I must just be obsessed with death. Apparently you think about it a lot more as you get older. Maybe you could chart how when I was in my 20s I talked about sex all the time, and in my 40s it's just death.

The camera is an eye that sees and records the lives of filthy people. Its pictures are hung in museums and published in thick books that future generations can see how horrible life was.

I like comedy but I guess I don't think [my art] is that funny, either. It's too dark and a bit weird in places to be genuinely, uniformly hilarious and function as comedy.

The work, I suppose, is made in the editing, whereby I make literally hundreds of drawings, and then a much smaller percentage of those become the finished work.

I think circumstance plays a big part in terms of what I do. For example, if I wasn't ever able to show in an art gallery I probably wouldn't really make very much sculpture. But I've had the opportunity to show in big spaces, so I want to fill up that space in the same way you might want to fill up a page.