ARTISTS TALKING

Sutton House is the last remaining Tudor house in Hackney. The National Trust, who manage the property, let me use both the basement chapel and the Georgian parlour for site-specific installations – a heroic act, as I'd only ever exhibited paintings beforehand.

The wall-mounted works that I exhibited were more 'growths' than paintings, extending from the wall in defiance of gravity. I hoped to seduce the viewer with the sticky viscosity of edible-looking matter, whilst the gluttonous excess of the pieces would render them mildly repulsive.

In the chapel, I hung a series of more than two hundred sequentially faded childhood photographs. Having framed them with varying degrees of funereal ostentation – the more faded the photo, the grander the frame – I then installed them on a background of 1970s floral wallpaper.

I filled the room with the aroma of moth balls, hoping the audience would feel stifled; creating a suffocating environment in which they would confront the weight of a half-remembered childhood. My intention was to question the veracity of the memories we cherish, whether these are from our own childhood, or a misplaced nostalgia for a mythical past.

The Georgian parlour, formerly a place for the taking of tea and polite conversation, is now an eau-de-Nil panelled museum room.

Having collected many family secrets, either sent or revealed to me, I used these otherwise unspeakable narratives of abuse, self-harm, unknown parentage, concealed sexual identity and long-standing enmities by writing them into the interior of porcelain teacups. By piling these in precarious stacks behind the glass of the antique display cabinet, I could imagine a formal tea party where the guests behaved with conventional politeness to each other, but their private thoughts are hidden within their own teacup and are poisoning them with every sip they take.

Much of my current work is concerned with ideas of Englishness and the unstable, mythological nature of a national identity. This presently involves messing with Constable's Haywain, Enid Blyton's book titles, rust and the detritus swept from my stairs.