It's interesting that it is in painting that you have explored especially dangerous territories. I'm thinking of your Pinky Pinky series and the terrifying nature of whatever it is that lurks ‘beneath’, and the Shame paintings. Is there a correlation between exploring such issues and doing it specifically through painting?

I think that the paint stands as an object of unspeakability. There's nothing that can be spoken, but there's this uncanny thing that can sit in the world and attract accretions of meaning and expose our own repressed impulses. It's the same old human story. Except different every time. Pinky Pinky is a myth or urban legend. It's a fiction, but you can project onto that myth, or even enact through it, all sorts of fantasies and things that you can't do in life. With Pinky Pinky and Shame, and in a different way with the cake paintings, there's a sense that the works are … something else. They're not actually paintings. I know that's a funny thing to say!

Maybe the repetition itself is indicative of something that you can't pin down. You're always pointing towards it but never capturing it. So the process of making and the something else become intertwined.

The process of working-through, to use a classic Freudian idea, would mean that you can't really capture that something else. In a way, the process and the inchoate presence it evinces is that something else. A kind of alterity. Something that doesn't fit. You know what intrigues me about all this? There's so much theory around it, the idea of the supplement for example. I've often been struck by how hard it sometimes is to reconcile these things with the theory. You understand it through the theorist's point of view – but then you think: how is it in the world? It's like Lacan's real. The subject that's unspeakable doesn't have words; it exceeds language. But then you think: well, how? It's impossible to find the how by its very definition. For me the only way to have a sense of it is through the palpability of physical process.