I find the octopus so fleshy, so slimy, and really erotic.

I had to buy a whole box of the small ones which I then gave to Charlie and the other model on the shoot. I got the biggest one I could find, although itвЂ™s a lot smaller than the one in HokusaiвЂ™s painting. I woke up at four in the morning to get the octopuses from Billingsgate market in London. Tentacles have always seemed to me very phallic. His work is a very erotic scene of a naked woman with a small octopus and a gigantic octopus. This picture was inspired by The Dream of the FishermanвЂ™s Wife by the Japanese artist Hokusai. I was trying to make a cornucopia of men, with different kinds of bodies. Half of them were life models and half were friends. I made a picture called the Feast with a group of naked men, inspired by old paintings of groups of naked women. In my version, it was me sitting on a naked man. In one of the images, I recreated FuseliвЂ™s 1781 painting The Nightmare, in which thereвЂ™s a woman lying on the bed, thereвЂ™s a demon sitting on her belly, and the demon is trying to have sex with her while she sleeps. For my videos, IвЂ™ve asked men to do mundane things like chopping carrots вЂ“ but naked Even when I put myself in my work, itвЂ™s not like one person is definitely the subject and the other is definitely the object.

I try to be the one who is in control, but this is a fantasy, because my power is never guaranteed. I donвЂ™t want to portray them in a degrading way, and I donвЂ™t want to simply reverse the gender roles. I try to show menвЂ™s vulnerability in these photographs. I think getting banned was actually quite a nice, funny end to the whole thing. And then I got banned from it вЂ“ I had a solo show in Sweden and the gallerist thought it would be interesting to invite people to the opening via Tinder, but youвЂ™re not allowed to promote anything through the app. In art history, we already have a lot of those.Д®ventually I stopped using Tinder after the whole process of talking to people on it, going to their homes and photographing them became very repetitive. I chose the men partially because of personal preferences, but also, I didnвЂ™t want to photograph very stereotypically masculine men. Or if they replied they would want something else. I messaged a lot of men, but most of them ignored me. I started getting interested in the male and female gaze and thought it would be interesting to use the app to find men for my photographs. For example, how men would swipe right a lot more than women did. When I started there I was using Tinder for dating, and was intrigued by the gender dynamic. IвЂ™m currently studying at the Royal College of Art in London. I have been interested in feminism and gender issues since I was young. I found Charlie through a life modelling website, and it wasnвЂ™t until I showed this image to my PhD tutor that I discovered he is the son of Pink FloydвЂ™s David Gilmour and kind of famous.

Octopus painting