BECOMING ONE

These images are included because I enjoy how this couple have started to look like each other. I dressed them both in the same jacket (which was chosen for it masculine qualities) and display them side by side so we can see the subtle interplay of gender between them. I feel that this is a couple who are so close to each other that they have started becoming one. They are transcending.

I also find it funny because it makes me think of supposed incest porn where the actors are siblings, when in actual fact they just found two performers who look vaguely similar (I'm not sure if this is such a big thing in straight porn, but it's a major theme in the gay industry).

THE SECOND KISS

These are perhaps the oldest pictures to appear in this book. I shot the original images when I was 17 in an explosion of Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts and Jarman-esque angst. I felt that they deserved a place here, particularly with the new border I created for them. I took a screenshot of some pornography that I was watching and started playing about with it on photoshop and created this ornate frame. The body positions had interested me so much, they were so symmetrically placed, like something from a Busby Berkley film that I felt it had to be included into my aesthetic work.

BOUND LOUIS

This image is inspired by the huge number of photoshopped pictures of celebrities in compromising positions. Instead of doing it in photoshop though I decided to reproduce it physically, using a rough mask. I have been making work about Louis Tomlinson from the boy band One Direction for a long time now, and he sparks my erotic interest greatly. To me, he is a perfect object. I wanted to create a feeling of reverence as well as rough cut reality. This is why I included the framed picture of Louis, which normally resides on my desk.

THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

I am a huge of lurid American crime fiction. Thus Thomas Harris holds a special place in my heart, as does the spectacular film adaptation of one of his most famous books The Silence of the Lambs. The character of Buffalo Bill as a homicidal false transsexual is so fascinating to me. He is a character obsessed with growth, with transformation and that excites me. The book contains these long passages about the muscular appearance of the killer, and of his unearthly voice. This was captured so well in the film that it transported me to new realms of pleasure. In particular I enjoyed the famous scene where Buffalo Bill dresses as a woman and parades around his room.

This picture for me speaks of that famous cinematic moment, but also of my own gender play, ranging from wearing to women's clothes but identifying as male to play acting at being women when I was a young child. I feel this picture is both glamorous and grotesque, which is how I feel most good things are.

MEDEA

As a child, Medea was an icon to me. Both the family friendly priestess Medea in the the Harryhausen epic Jason and the Argonauts, and Maria Callas in Pasolini's barbaric masterpiece Medea.
I loved the vibrancy of the Harryhausen universe, but Maria Callas was a God. She was LA DIVINA. She suffered so divinely, she wielded the powers of the ancient worlds, she shook kingdoms with her rage, She was the land, she was the earth, she was the oceans, those eyes, that nose, those lips. She was everything I ever wanted to be.

For my portrayal of Medea, I wanted to fuse the two queens of my youth. I styled Diyala as Maria Callas, flowing scarves, strong silhouettes anchored to the earth with headscarves and jewellery, but dressed her in Harryhausen colours, whites, pinks, greens, light and airy. I also used images from Jason and the Argonauts as the borders for the images, a further fusing of the two Medeas.

The text is lines from the Pasolini film. They are said with such venom, such emotion that for me they invoke the entire suffering of womanhood and queendom.

PETER PAN

When contemplating youth as an element of eroticism, I am drawn to the figure of Peter Pan. As a child I was attracted to the Disney cartoon of the confident young boy, even more so to the live action version which featured the angelic looking Jeremy Sumpter. I decided to provide my own interpretation of Peter Pan using my boyfriend Lewis, who despite being older than me retains a child like face. This was the first set of pictures I used him for and I was very pleased with them. Because of his colouring it forced me to stray away from my usual palate of red, black and white. I had wanted to explore blues and greens for some time, but felt unable to.

SNOW

A lot of my work is based on my own performance ideals. Sometimes when I'm emotional I find it very hard to do anything constructive, so I dress up and play around with that instead. I remember there was this one night where I was meant to be going to a party with my boyfriend but i felt unable to leave my flat, I was locked in some kind of downward mental spiral, so I dressed up. It went one step further and ended up with me setting up stage lights in my snow covered yard at midnight, switching on a video camera, blaring out music and dancing in the snow. At one point I was aware of our neighbours watching me from their windows, transfixed, but I did not let this deter me. Exhibitionism always cleanses me of my inner struggles. A few days later, the snow had still not melted, so I had a friend take pictures of me in my performance outfit so that I could have some kind of memento of the event.

THE CARNAL GODS

This is an image I have created of the Carnal Gods. Taking a tribal aesthetic and mixing it with various religious iconographies, such a Christian and Hindu, I have created my own divine effect. The excessive limbs speak to me of decadence and extravagance. Even though I have used a male and female model, they fulfil my desire for androgyny by looking extremely similar to each other. Love and sex is not about gender, it's about becoming part of the same transcending orgasm.

This was an outtake that I was so taken with that I felt it had a place in the new body of work. It was meant to be a fun, spontaneous moment where the models dropped character, and this was the result. I love it, as it seems to be the second half to the image above. We have all seen historical religious figures deified in art, but we have all known that that is not really how they could have looked. I feel that by having both the deified image and the less doctored image in the same body of work that it begins to write it's own mythologies.

SHAVED

This is an image of my friend Diyala having her head shaved. I find myself incredibly drawn to women who are not afraid to appear androgynous. I persuaded this girl to shave her head, I convinced her it would be liberating and she would look incredible, and it all came true. Two years ago I shaved my head entirely for the first time and it was such a strange feeling. I dressed in a much more masculine way than I did previously and it took a long time for me to feel comfortable again. It was an experience well worth having, but not necessarily to be repeated.

SUMMER BOYS

These are images taken during the summer at a friend's house in Preston Road, near Wembley. During an uninterrupted spell of good weather, we had barbeques in their garden every day. There were five boys living in this house at the time and so I was drawn to this. This was a very different sort of masculinity than I had experienced before. Previously I had always been drawn to the strutting, peacocking pastiches of sports players. These boys were different. To start with, they were all on creative courses. They were all "apart from traditional society", all were outcasts at school, much the same as myself. But still, an inherrent MALE attitude springs forth. A desire to provide for the group, a desire to lead, a desire to prepare the meal, an easiness when it comes to removing clothes to feel comfortable, a jocular competitiveness, this is all alien to me. I look at these boys, who although would be considered different to some concepts of male culture, are all heterosexual and all able to pass as "one of the lads". I can see all them as wonderful fathers or brothers, and yet this is not something I can see in myself, and this is sad. These boys do not fascinate me the way the sporty peacocks do, they inspire a sense of yearning instead.