Joining IdeasTap was exactly what I needed. I was 22 and had just moved to London after doing my degree in Plymouth.

It was a great way to find out what other people were up to, to promote my work, to build my profile and to get help with funding. You don’t really get taught properly about applying for funding at university. 

Coming Up was the first big opportunity I won. I can’t believe it was a year ago. I remember going to the first big workshop and thinking “I’m a performance artist and professional wrestler. I am so out of place here.” But in a way I think that difference worked in my favour and it was really, really fun.

During Coming Up I was still studying my Masters and setting up ]performance s p a c e [ in Hackney Wick. I barely had time to think over those months.

]performance s p a c e[ doesn’t get any funding, but we throw parties to raise money. It’s shared between six and 10 artists, but people are passing though all the time. We’ve got Martin O’Brien at the moment, who’s an incredible performance artist. He has cystic fibrosis, so his work is about sickness and endurance.

We just celebrated our first birthday and had an exhibition with one picture from every artist who’d been through. It was amazing: like a who’s who of the live art community.

I feel like I’m ready to leave academia for a little while now. I will probably do a PhD at some point, but I’m an artist and this is what I want to do now.

I’ve had some great gigs recently. I went to Canada in January for a performance festival. It was a show that I did originally at Spill Festival last year and the Canadian curator saw me there. It went really well; I did a wrestling workshop, a little talk, performed and then flew back the next day.

I’ve also had a couple of great gigs in Paris. Although, I did three blood pieces in a week and I don’t think it’s healthy to see yourself bleed that much, in such a short period of time. Blood is something that connects us all. I think it’s such a beautiful substance and it reminds us that we’re all bodies.

BritWres-Fest 2012 is the biggest project I’ve ever done. It's a collaboration between me and Alex Shane, who has been pioneering british wrestling for almost 20 years. It’ll be at the Coronet Theatre in Elephant and Castle on 1 April. It’ll be similar to what we did at Coming Up, but amplified. We want to celebrate British wrestling as a whole industry. We’ve got eight matches from the top companies in the UK. They will each sponsor it, which means we can give the tickets away for free.

The campaign is wrestling with ethics. It’s about raising money for charity [Great Ormond Street Hospital] and supporting emerging wrestling talent. We want there to be proper training, scholarships and a real awareness of safety.

We’re putting aside 200 tickets for IdeasTap members and would love to see as many people there as possible.

To find out more about BritWres-Fest 2012, visit the website. 

To read more about ]performance s p a c e[ visit their website.