MARLENE DUMAS: I've never had a baby before, I was 36, and it was fascinating and also scary that suddenly there's this new human being in the world that is your responsibility. So all these different emotions that is part of the birth of a child, I wanted to make paintings that could express that.
The First People is these four babies. What is interesting, at the time when I painted them, people said that my babies looked quite horrific and alien, but actually all I did was something that is often done in art, you know, changing the scale of smaller things into very big things.
So the babies indeed were much bigger than ordinary babies, but their mannerisms or their poses were actually just taken from the Polaroid snapshots I've made of my daughter, after her birth; and also there's a boy in between there, which is a friend's child.
I am very sad that the Polaroid is actually going away, because the Polaroid for me didn't really feel so much like photography. It felt much more just like making images. It had this physical aspect that was a bit like drawing. So I have used the Polaroid a lot, it was just such an addictive thing to do, to see the image immediately.