It is very important to develop the thing that you are naturally good at, that you are truly interested in.

You can take things from the past, from the culture, from the immediate past and things that have not yet entered the culture, so they have no history yet. You can create your own context.

If you were really interested in being creative in teaching, it was possible to try new methods and that was really what we did in Goldsmiths - we used the freedom of the time.

In the studio, it took me a long time to work out how to make paintings that had the intensity that I was able to create by painting whole rooms. There is a very limited number of colours but there are many variations. I decided to use the purest palette that I could.

You can see in my paintings, I've taken away the context, I've taken away the shadows, I've taken away expression, I've taken away the personal, and yet so much remains!

I came to painting through sculpture, to images through objects. I think that images sit in the middle, somewhere between objects and words.

I was poorer than anyone I'd ever met. But it was a great time to be a young artist - I remember it as a period of exceptional creative freedom and adventure, when one was regularly presented with works of art unlike anything one had ever seen before.