Maisie Cousins is a 23-year-old photographer from West London who deals in the visceral and grotesque. Her work eschews the conventional ideals of beauty and sex that we are served up by, say, fashion photography, and instead hones in on strange surfaces, icky materials and lesser-seen body parts.The effect is jarring. Super-saturated and super-guttural, Maisie's photos can't help but force a reaction out of you. They've also earned her a place in the Tate and on Dazed's 100 Here, she speaks to Refinery29 about her influences and intentions, and tells us what it's like working with rotten meat and vegetables for a living.When I was a kid, I would borrow my mum’s 4 megapixel camera and take pictures of my barbies just for fun. I carried on an interest with photography throughout my teens, especially with things like blogging and social media coming into my life. I’m not a very academic person but I always knew I wanted to either do painting or something creative. Living in London in a small flat meant I couldn’t do anything on a large scale and photography enabled me to create big photographs from very tiny set ups. I ended up studying a BA in Fine Art Photography after I realised this is what I wanted to do.I think my general themes and subject matter have stayed pretty consistent but I’ve noticed the type of work I make depends on where I’m living. For instance, when I was a teenager living at home in West London, I was really into black and white and shooting on film. Out the window is a view of the Westway and Trellick Tower, which I think heavily influenced me. When I went away to university in Brighton I found the buildings and surroundings so uninspiring and started making a lot of studio work. Now that I’m back renting a small flat, it’s all close up still life stuff in my home studio.