It hadn’t occurred to me to ask Tindra Frost if she had any objections to performing a sex act with a dead fish. This wasn’t a casual request between friends, this was for the filming of my eighteenth short film “The Wet Nurse & Her Diabolical Concerns”.

In my head I had some sort of notion along the lines of “She’s Icelandic. Those guys are cool with fish”, which is possibly a little racist on my part, but then I am apparently a terrible person.

Forgive me.

Nonetheless she was all too happy to suffer for my art, the fish was suitably sucked, it’s dead eye disappearing and reappearing betwixt Tindra’s lips, whom I furnished with chewing gum once the dreadful deed was accomplished. I think it is what the fish would have wanted, even though it’s unlikely he imagined such a destiny whilst traversing the briny deep.

She was just as game when I produced a large tiger prawn for her to place between her breasts for a despondent tit fuck. I confess there was a moment of panic after the scene was shot as an angry rash of red bumps sprung up across her chest. I remembered stories of unprepared sea food being highly toxic and began entertaining ideas of her mutating into some sort of prawn/woman creature.

Like a particularly undesirable and angry looking crustaceous mermaid.

No transformation took place, which I was a little disappointed with as it could have led to a memorable performance.

‘The Wet Nurse & her Diabolical Concerns’ was my first project to feature dialogue. In this case I made the most of my subject’s nationality to include Scandinavian narration with English subtitles and worked with Tindra on the translation. Hopefully the final result bears some resemblance to my original words, though my own understanding of the Icelandic language is sadly lacking. This was a particularly delightful process for me, as the subtitled words over some nicely shot black and white imagery allows me the indulgence of considering it a Bergmanesque homage of sorts. With extra seafood.

I realise, of course, that Iceland isn’t technically Scandinavian, but please allow me the self proclaimed comparison to one of my cinematic heroes.

Other comparisons I have received over the years include nods towards Hitchcock (we share the black and white thing, I guess?), Jodorowsky (again, no idea why, maybe some moments in Fando y Lis) and a few quotes that I quite enjoy. For example: “If Lars Von Trier directed porn" and my particular favourite “David Lynch with a Hard-on”. Those are some pretty great quotes and some intimidatingly talented people to be compared with, though I don’t agree with any of them as useful for drawing a comparison with.

When drawn on the subject I am all too happy to reference Nobuyoshi Araki, Koji Wakamatsu, Francesca Woodman and Hans Bellmer as worthy of mention as influences. With Bellmer in particular, I was struck by many comparable themes when I began to look deeper into his photography and illustrations and found this more than a little disconcerting.

My film “Plaything” was very much an exploration of these shared concerns and in the soundtrack I used treated segments from the “The Tales of Hoffmann”, an opera by Jacques Offenbach. An opera that includes a hero flung towards suicide by his love for an idealised automaton and had inspired Bellmer to construct his first doll. In my film however, it is the doll that is driven to suicide when she becomes aware of her own position as an objectified fantasy. The “hero” of my piece’s fate remains uncertain, though presumably he found another doll to play with. So it goes.

“Performance & Appreciation” follows a similar path, with Portia Victoria (a very talented musician as well as model and actress) undergoing a dollification process of sorts and performing sexually and musically for a passive audience. An audience who go on to sabotage her and her need for approval, forcing her to find new ways to delight and entertain. Again, so it goes.

As with most of my short films and photographs, these works find themselves pinned to a meeting point of pornograpic tropes and clichés as well as surrealist cinema, art and literature. This is a style that I had gradually tumbled into, spending a few years as a self-taught run of the mill art nude cliche before beginning to incorporate a few more psychosexual elements into my work and turning to short film as a further means to express my ideas.

Not all of my films are as morbid in their interests though. I regard “Suitably Rewarded” (which details attempts and then instruction on how a woman might suck her own breast, should she decide to do so for whatever ridiculous reason), “Habitual Disappointment” (concerning a bathroom's staunch no-smoking policy) and “Iðunn’s Pollination” (a film I was hired to shoot for a Halloween event at London’s Scala cinema, which closes with a ridiculous comedy cumshot) to be ostensibly funny films and have sat in with audiences who on the whole seemed to laugh at the right places.

Speaking of ridiculous cumshots, it’s probably worth going into a little more detail as to how I have been inspired by pornography. From the persistent eye contact, to the adult movie inspired compositions that are often included.

I’ve been called out on this a number of times, as though it is in someway a bad thing to include in my repertoire. I am aware of pornography, I’m aware of it’s cliches, I’m aware that these cliches are in place precisely because of their exceedingly evocative sexual allure. Thus I see no issue using them whilst creating work that is specifically interested in desire. Albeit with a different intent.

This does mean that I appear to have painted myself into a corner, with art establishments finding my work too provocative and more erotically orientated audiences often finding themselves disconcerted by the content of what have been described as my “gloomy fantasies”.

A curator with whom I exhibited in London earlier this year told me that the gallery had expressed their discomfort at showing my work, despite it appearing on the same walls as some far more explicit content and such reticence is not an unusual response. One of my favourite pieces of feedback contained the line “Your art feels like someone just stabbed me in my stomach with something really cold.” which brought a big glowing smile of warmth and delight to my face, as did “You desire to sink a fish hook into the libido”. So my output certainly seems to get under a few folk’s skin and the accusations of misogyny in particular are fascinating for me.

Which probably sounds disingenuous. And kind of is.

Rather than a lascivious lechery, my work is concerned with the framing and skewering of desire, poking a sharp stick into the underbelly of our (well, specifically my own) petty lusts and tastes, whilst acknowledging the predicament of being completely at their mercy. It is the acts themselves that are being scrutinised, not those performing them, who are often avatars for the artist, complicit in their participation.

And more often than not I am mocking my own sexual proclivities with my output and my own doomed quest for the possibility of the ego’s fleeting obliteration, the little death rumoured to be found lurking at the moment of orgasm. I learnt a long time ago that the sexual imagination makes for a fine hiding place, “ A Special Form of Denial” as it were and it sometimes occurs to me that I have placed a false importance on this particular form of escapism.

Yet as conflicted on the matter as I am, I’m not pretending to somehow float entirely above such carnal desire. There is joy taken when putting together a piece of work, constructed from my own sexual imagination and inklings. There is an appreciation and obsessive compulsion for the eroticised female form.

There is an Icelandic girl giving a blow job of sorts to a dead fish and tit fucking a tiger prawn.

And if that’s not a solid metaphor for the state of the erotic mentality of the twenty first century, then I don’t know what is.