EG: You’ve said that one day you want to take your art to space?
was the only coloured world in the entire fair. I’m not discrediting the fact that artists need the market, but art should be created with an impetus to engage people. Some asshole collectors-cum-investors aren’t making informed decisions, they’re buying based on investment portfolios, a perceived trajectory of success which means they can cash in on it in the future. But I’ve known collectors that buy because they love it – if it grows in price over the years, who knows. It’s a far more gratifying way of buying works. Maybe I have the luxury to do so, but I don’t sell to people I don’t like.
LIV: I have this feeling that I want to – it has to happen – I have to send these works back… EG: Back home? LIV: Back home, exactly! Human beings, since time immemorial, have been drawn to gold. For me, it’s not necessarily aesthetics, but gold’s cosmological story. Just like every other metal or element, gold is made from the death of a star. When a star starts to die it implodes – it happens literally over nanoseconds and gets extremely hot – every heat signature creates a different element or metal, and one of the last elements before it completely implodes, is gold. For gold to even get to Earth it travelled on a meteor, then it takes people to mine the earth and sift through dirt to acquire it. People are very fixated by gold in my work, and want to know where I get it from. My real intent is that I actually want to mine my own gold, but until then, I have to go and get it from California… which is…
EG: The price of your work is affected by your decision to use 24 karat gold; why is this so integral? LIV: Gold has all these amazing properties. It’s one of the softest, most malleable metals, yet it is almost indestructible. Nasa uses gold in their spacesuits, space shuttles and satellites. Space-helmets are covered in gold because it won’t conduct certain rays from the sun, it reflects them back...
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