The work is never finished because women forever will be eternally mysterious to me - and I will always find that point where people are lost in thought, observed but lacking self-consciousness, the most beautiful.

I look at my women with a Shakespearean element too - the variant of emotions they are capable of - it's not all completely dour, there is a bit of humor in there too! I actually think the whole Shakespearean world is wrapped up in every human being, from beauty to destruction and everything in between.

I'll always remember Jean Paul Gaultier, who did a project based on Madonnas, remarking on the images, "Yours are much better." Gaultier is really smart, so it's good getting a compliment from him!

I'm inspired heavily by film influences - David Lynch's Blue Velvet, Federico Fellini, Alfred Hitchcock, Pedro Almodóvar, and what I see in the cinema - so there is a linking, an interweaving between memory, cinema and contemporary life, which the women in my pictures encapsulate.

When I began in the late '90s, I felt quite lonely. We were coming out of the grunge era; it was the time of Corinne Day, The Face, the height of the YBAs, where models had to be "real," on real locations with no lighting. I rebelled against the grungeys - I didn't find the faux naturalism to be representative!

When I look at the women, it's from a male gaze of being fascinated, because beyond my mother, I've been around notorious women all of my life, and then, secondly, when I look at women and try and create fictional stories around them.

I had been reading a lot of J.G. Ballard in the 90's and was fascinated by the idea of the vapid consumer society, the erotic charge of modern life, where the consumerist things we are coveting are just another form of destroying oneself - a modern world of uncertainty, where lost souls are trying to grab onto something for sense of contentment.