It is really important to have an obsessive need to construct something, to understand something from your own experience.

I think maybe the figures - that's a good word - the figures in my pictures are stand-ins for my own need to make a connection.

I'm not that particularly talented in terms of making anything or - I'm not technically efficient. I certainly don't know how to draw very well or paint, and I'm not good with computers. But I think the thing that I'm good at is willing something into life, no matter what. I do what it takes to get it done.

Every artist has a central story to tell, and the difficulty, the impossible task, is trying to present that story in pictures

I think that, in a sense, there's something about photography in general that we could associate with memory, or the past, or childhood.

There's a parallel between me going through these enormous efforts to try to make a moment that means something - and in a way, the figures are doing the same thing. There is that parallel, for sure.

I'm very moved by the fact that people are drawn into the pictures and that they do bring their own history and their own interpretation to the photograph. I think that's why they work in a certain way.