I loved the fact that this was their own house – artists Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Laura Epps and their daughter, Anna, who painted this to remember the house they were about to leave, to move to a new place. They lived in the most exotic house possible, influenced by orientalism: they literally made their home an imitation of a middle eastern palace. How did they even find all this stuff?

This photograph shows the British Antarctic expedition in 1910 – probably the last photo taken of this group of men who gave their lives in research. It was their curiosity and spirit that I admire so much, and I wish I could know more about them. What does it feel like to be out there on your own, not knowing whether or not you’re going to come back?

Just to think that this has come out of a single piece of stone... The skill to create such movement out of stone is overwhelming – and in my head it’s the wrong way around: what you’re doing is not creating it, but taking away. I’ve never understood how a sculptor can see this in their head.

This title means “the dreams of reason produce monsters”. Being Spanish, we all grow up studying these works by Goya – this one made after a period of ill-health and psychosis. These works are very dark; they're strange caricatures of morality and corruption in Spanish society, as Goya saw it, at the time of Napoleon.

I adore Turner, especially his late works. He’s able to completely represent how it would feel to be lost in the storm: you can feel the anguish of the sailor in the tiny boat in the middle of the dark sea. It was something we used as inspiration in English National Ballet’s production of Le Corsaire.

This is fascinating to me because it was prior to Isadora Duncan – an American dancer who had enormous impact in the ballet world – but she’s dressed in the manner of Isadora Duncan. I’m always surprised by the amount of women who were dancing around dressed in Greek tunics that we have never heard of.

Like all ballerinas, when you’re confronted by the mammoth task of dancing Swan Lake, you do all the research that you can – looking at real swans and how they move, but also the art that’s been inspired by swans and how they’ve been portrayed. Here, it’s interesting because the swan is masculine, rather than a female as in Swan Lake.

Eileen came to our rehearsals for Akram Khan's version of Giselle, and this is a portrait of two of our dancers – that’s one of the movements that we do. I love the fact that while we were creating a piece of work, other work was being created. This is Act I, when Albrecht and Giselle are falling in love and she’s expecting his child, and you can see perhaps we in the curve of her body that she’s a little bit pregnant.

I was completely struck by this. I think it’s somehow inspired by Ophelia, the Pre-Raphaelite painting… She's exquisitely beautiful, but there’s something dark about it too: you don’t know whether she’s having a bath or drowning. It brings the thought that there must be Ophelias of today, drowning their own sorrows in their own bath.

I fell in love with Venice the first time I went, and this is the building that says hello to you when you enter the Grand Canale. I’m also fascinated by Sickert, a very talented artist – but an artist with a very dark side.