Thinking of those who inspire me is difficult, as it changes every day. Artists I really admire are Yinka Shonibare, I love the spirit in his work, Marc Quinn, Greyson Perry - he reminds me of someone that would be a product of Tarvin, my home village - and Deborah Lawson, still quite unknown, she makes amazing jungle installations out of Turkish carpets.
I am so influenced by my surroundings. I love to travel and I love to explore tradition. One of the things I love about London is that you can immerse yourself in so many different cultures in a matter of hours, you can find yourself one night at a real badass grime club, with lots of Jamaicans with gold teeth followed by a hungover day at a transvestite's tea dance.
I’m always coming back to the same themes and it’s always the things that interested me when I grew up, I was an avid plane spotter (I still secretly am), I loved visiting The Slave museum in Liverpool and when staying at my Grandma’s in Leicester she would take me to explore mosques and temples - I had some very unusual and exotic experiences, that all took place here in England. England is great in that it’s full of blunt contradictions and odd things.
I like to make serious work with a sense of humor - someone said that about me once. I suppose my work is about putting things together that don’t fit, I find that I have a very fragmented psyche and I think this is true of most people. I want to expose this in my work. I love the idea of upsetting situations that make people think and then eventually laugh or cry. All my work tends to be about fashion and death. I choose to use locusts as a symbol in my work, due to their biblical relationship with destruction, found in the old testament.