“Fred is a toad who lived in my garden when I was young, Fred scared the sh*t out of me, he had X’s for eyes. At the time, I imagined (feels like rumour now) that my older brothers had cut them out.

Lone playtime in the garden often ended with being fully submerged in the lukewarm, sludgy shallow pond, like a two legged salamander… one thing would lead to another…

One day, whilst working on cartwheels by the pond, I saw a delicious tennis ball glowing through the algae. Yes!, I thought, I’m going to repeatedly ram that ball so hard against the house. As my hand cupped the glowing mass, I realised it was no Slazenger, it was a swollen, yellow, putrid toad. A michelin inflated neon carcass drifting like a silky damsel in a high end pop video.

Coincidences and evil brothers

A few days after, as I left my bedroom, there was Fred. Fred had no eyes but had made it into the house, up the stairs to near my bedroom. It was here my relationship to toads took a turn for the worse, though I remained slightly enthralled. In the years after these events I began pickling my brain with blue drinks, so who knows if there were any toads at all.

I've won two prizes in my life that I can remember, the first was for hula hooping - which took me as a total surprise as I stared unbelievably at my mid-section going for gold for an unnatural amount of time. The second was at an Easter fair for eating the most Jacob’s Cream Crackers in under a minute, my mother evil eyeing me from the sidelines, hoping this wasn't my destiny. I won because I had worked out how to move the crackers around my mouth at the same rate as eating them, like a sexy cement mixer.

Anyway, let's see what I can do this time!”

Natalie Price Hafslund (b. 1987 Devon UK) is a British-Norwegian visual artist working with text, sculpture and performance. She studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art, London and Hypnosis at the UK college of Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy. Price Hafslund often works with found objects: material, emotional and social which she reconfigures, interested in the threshold between our inside and outside worlds and that in which we might share with each other.

Supported by Kulturdirektoratet, Fond for Lyd og Bilde and Norske Billedkunstnere