I have always been fascinated by Paleolithic art – cave paintings, sculptures like the Venus of Willendorf, all those hands on the walls. At some point I began to wonder if our response to those images was only due to their great antiquity or if they are – as I believe – written into our basic code. We often hear people expound on ‘changed attitudes about female beauty’ in comparison to other epochs, or prehistory – as though they know, or as though we, in the European West, have a monopoly on what ‘beauty’ is, even now. But what if nothing has really changed?

Betty was, at first, an experiment. I was curious how people would react to her. Would they be horrified? Offended? Or would they take her as she came? And she didn’t come alone. As soon as I started to work with the idea, all her friends turned up – the dog, the bird, snakes, a cyclops – a whole traveling carnival. At points, the pictures have a strongly Gothic bent. Elsewhere they seem borrowed from Fellini or Punch and Judy – they are versatile. They are a great cast for private jokes, satire and Saturnalia.

And so, off we went…