“I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.”

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut

The aliens have been telling me what to do. Telling me to start their family, to begin populating. I’m starting to make out forms and materials that will best suit their way of life. When I first met them they were hundreds of sketches, but now they crawl and hide. I know where they are. Is it time to start spreading the news?

I have a mad scientist alter-ego which researches and communicates with alien lifeforms. I use this character to be wild and more expressive than I ever could be; I filter my mental struggles through to my alter-ego in order to deal with my issues in a humorous and playful way.

Collaboration with other people is also very important in my practice; I like to bounce my ideas off of others in order to create things that can’t be done on my own. I sometimes collaborate as the mad scientist, and sometimes as myself. However, most of the time I flit between both myself and the scientist as it is hard to define where one character starts and the other ends. I can then also say that there is a collaboration occurring between myself and the scientist which I often find difficult to do. As mentioned earlier, my alter-ego carries the darker side of myself—so when I have to confront and analyse the work that we’ve made, it is sometimes hard to see the pain and madness that the scientist created because in reality, I know that is me making this stuff.

I want you to take me and my aliens seriously. I want you to feel puzzled and terrified because that is how I feel. You can also laugh too—because I also do that.