Paul McCartney famously says that he got the melody for Yesterday in a dream. I used to think that was artistic licence, but then it happened to me with this image. I had a dream about a half woman-half animal, standing alone in the middle of a field, with trees surrounding her.

I was working on a series of images, called Madre, about the depiction of womanhood. The media in Bolivia always present women in a traditionally feminine way. It is rare to see a woman who displays more masculine attributes and her not be immediately labelled as a lesbian – there is no nuance.

When I was 14, I dressed exclusively in men’s clothes for about a year, which had more to do with my insecurities than my gender. I never liked clothes that hug your body, like skinny jeans. My mum didn’t wonder about my gender identity, she just understood it was part of my self-expression. My therapist used to say that I have masculine traits: I am ambitious, competitive; I welcome the masculine in me.

So for this image, made in 2019, I wanted to show a woman who is comfortable in her masculine energy. The bull that the woman is holding is part of a costume worn by dancers of the waka tokori, a Bolivian dance. These national dances are inspired by colonial times and this one imitates Bolivian bullfighting, which is different from the Spanish – the men only taunt the bull [rather than kill it]. The bullfighter, and the bull itself, are symbols of masculinity.

I wanted to have this nakedness in my portraiture, because I love women’s bodies. Nudity is always sexualised in Bolivia and the first time I saw the nudes in images by the US photographer Ryan McGinley, where the bodies didn’t feel sexual, it seemed so rebellious to me. Being naked is being oneself. It doesn’t necessarily have to be sexual, or allude to desire. It can just be the comfort of being in your own skin.

The woman in the picture is Marta Salinas, a theatre actor from Bolivia, who lives in Argentina. She had come back to my city, Cochabamba, and when I saw her performing I felt her power and how in control of her body she was.

I usually meet with people before photographing them. I want to get to know them, explain my ideas and to hear what the other person has to say. With Madre, I started from the idea that women are offshoots of the archetypes of either Mary Magdalene or the Virgin Mary. I would ask them: do you feel more like a Mary Magdalene or a Virgin Mary? And with Marta, of course, it was Mary Magdalene. But it’s always a fun question to ask, because some sitters said: “I am definitely a mother Mary, but please can I be a Mary Magdalene for the shoot?” I thought that was very cute, and it also shows that we are not just one or the other.

I live in Paris now but when I was working in Bolivia, my mother became my team and another beautiful aspect of the project. She started as my chauffeur, because I’m very bad at driving, and she is a teacher – and the reason I gravitated towards culture. I was very insecure (I still am sometimes) about my own work and my ideas, but with my mom, it felt very easy. Even when we did a whole session and no pictures came out of it, she would just roll her eyes and move on. It was her idea to shoot in this field, because when I described my dream, she remembered a friend who grows fruit and keeps bees just outside the city.

Marta was incredible. I think you can see that she’s a performer from her expression, and that she uses her body as a tool, because her body, to me, suits this power, and she’s standing with such commitment.

Marisol Mendez is the winner of this year’s Saltzman-Leibovitz prize. A selection of works by the nominated artists will be at Photo London, Olympia, until 17 May.

Marisol Mendez’s CV

Born: Cochabamba, Bolivia
High point: Winning the Saltzman-Leibovitz prize. The nominators, nominees, and jury are all people I respect and admire, which made the recognition especially meaningful.
Top tip: Images are never innocent. They carry embedded histories and ideologies, shaping reality as much as they draw from it. To work with images is to navigate that, questioning not only what is visible, but how and why it is made to be seen.