I make art because ideas rarely leave me alone.

My head is constantly producing them. If I don’t get them out, they turn into a kind of physical restlessness. Making something — a photograph, a poem, a drawing, a print, a painting — is how I give those ideas somewhere to live.

I have been creative since childhood, although I put that part of myself aside for a number of years. I found my way back to it as an adult, and for several years now it has been my full-time work. I am still driven by the same thing: the energy of creating, the curiosity of learning something new, and the possibility that by understanding myself a little better, I might also understand other people a little better.

The human body, particularly the nude body, keeps returning in my work. I have always been fascinated by it in its natural state. For centuries, nudity had an obvious place in art; today it is increasingly treated as inherently sexual. I find that both limiting and strange.

I want to push against that.

I am a feminist, and some of my work is deliberately provocative, but provocation does not have to mean sexualisation. Sometimes it is about women taking control of how their bodies are seen. Sometimes it is simply about showing a body without asking it to perform anything at all. I am interested in nudity as something natural, individual and human.

Over time I have also had to let go of perfection. That has changed my photography as much as anything else. I am increasingly drawn to situations that cannot be completely controlled: the unposed energy of Bedtime Stories and Bathtime Stories, or the immediacy of Polaroid, where there is no editing afterwards.

That attraction to the physical is also why I keep moving between media. I photograph, write, paint, draw and make linocuts. I like having materials and tools in my hands. There is something satisfying about a carving tool cutting through linoleum, paint moving across a surface, or building something in wood because the thing I wanted did not exist yet.

I do not plan photographs in detail. I prefer to arrive, understand the place and the person in front of me, and work from there. Poems are even less predictable. They tend to arrive whenever they want, often forcing me to stop whatever I am doing and write down a line or an entire piece before it disappears.

The Wadden Sea is the exception in the sense that it predates almost everything else. I was born and raised by it. It is where I find calm, concentration, energy and ideas. The sea is where my eyes can stretch all the way to the horizon.

Poetry is where I question myself most directly. It is where aesthetics matter less, and where I test the stories I have built about myself and the world to see whether they still hold. Much of the rest of my work comes afterwards — as another way of giving those reflections form.

I am endlessly curious about life and the people in it.

Mostly, I make things because I can’t stop myself from wanting to see what they might become.

M. Oceano