26-year-old New Yorker Legacy Russell is discovering the joys of living in London – including Lemsip when you’re fighting a 2-day head cold. 'It’s the best! Although, I have to say, the taste was kind of jarring.’ As an artist she moves effortlessly across mediums - photography, video, small sculptures - and is also a writer and curator.

But she doesn’t like being labelled. ‘I prefer to acknowledge the fluidity of creative practice, working towards the notion of a total work of art like Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk. I think of Henry Miller who was a phenomenal writer and a painter as well.’

Whether making a slow-mo video analysis of Lindsay Lohan’s court appearance or splicing together drag queen Ru Paul with Jean-Luc Godard via Twin Peaks, Russell examines celebrity, and the rites and rules of gender in the voyeuristic digital age. ‘The internet is an exquisite corpse. It is the most sprawling and expansive example of performativity to ever happen, all at once, in the history of art. It’s a Gesamtkunstwiki!’

Russell’s work takes the rituals and habitual ceremonies of the everyday – ‘the banal acts of looking in the mirror, smoking a cigarette or putting on lipstick” and elevates them. ‘It takes the ordinary and makes it extraordinary.’ While living in New York, she held fellowships at The Met and Creative Time, and got her start at The Whitney Museum, producing programs for audiences under 30. She also worked with the anonymous art collective The Bruce High Quality Foundation. ‘It was very much so like being in a big family – a lot of hard work and a lot of fun, all at once.’

And the work of art she’d most like to own? Well it only exists in Legacy’s head. At the moment. ‘Tilda Swinton in a glass box in my living room, napping. David Blaine napping on top of that box. The glass box resting atop Houdini’s grave plot at Machpelah Cemetery in Queens. James Franco throwing stones at that glass box.’

We’ll just take a moment to visualise that one.