The artist: Petros Chrisostomou

Chrisostomou will have his first solo exhibition at the Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool in 2009 (Gautier Deblonde)

The giant, full-colour photographs of Petros Chrisostomou put you in mind of the magical world of Alice in Wonderland as it was realised by Sir John Tenniel, the first and still the greatest of Lewis Carroll's illustrators. Tenniel plays with scale in order to alarm and amuse us, simultaneously – the Red Queen's face looms horribly out at us, disproportionately large; Alice herself drinks a potion that causes her to grow and grow until her body is squeezed up against the ceilings. Chrisostomou, who graduated with an MA in Fine Art from London's Royal Academy schools last summer after a first degree at Central St Martins, does something similar in his photographs.

He takes objects with which we are all too familiar – a high-heeled shoe or two; some eggs; a head of blonde hair – and he plays with scale to such an extent that they look monstrously large in their contexts. The consequence of this is that they turn into the stuff of dreams – sometimes playful ones, at other times nightmarish. The perfectly ordinary object becomes wholly extraordinary. The known world, with all its paraphernalia, becomes an unreal construction, a kind of bizarre still-life. As in Alice, the objects he concentrates on – a buckled frankfurter; scraps of doner-kebab meat – suddenly seem to take on a reality of their own. Too small for the spaces they occupy, they want to disrupt them, burst out of them, shoulder them aside.

"I started making things as a child in north Finchley during the 1980s," he tells me. His mother had come to England from Cyprus in the 1970s; his father was born in Swindon. "That was before the world of computer games. It was a time when you had to invent your own imaginative worlds by putting a blanket over a couple of chairs, simple things like that." Next year already promises to be a busy one. Several group shows are under discussion, and in November he has his first solo exhibition at the Ceri Hand Gallery in Liverpool. He has also won the Royal Academy/Land Securities award for 2009, which will give him free studio space at 48 Oxford Street for a year, a bursary and an exhibition in June.