I feel that one of the roles of the artist, in the way I define it, is that I need to be not just someone observing these tiny pockets of people on the planet who have devoted their lives to preserving whatever it is they're passionate about. I want to be them. I am one of them. I just have a different outlet and final outcome as an artist than many of them would. For them, the process can just end in holding on to it, just knowing they've got it tucked away in their private collection. I value that so much, but I feel the conversation dies in a way there.

I feel that one of the roles of the artist, in the way I define it, is that I need to be not just someone observing these tiny pockets of people on the planet who have devoted their lives to preserving whatever it is they're passionate about. I want to be them. I am one of them. I just have a different outlet and final outcome as an artist than many of them would. For them, the process can just end in holding on to it, just knowing they've got it tucked away in their private collection. I value that so much, but I feel the conversation dies in a way there.

To this day, I've never had an assistant. I really insist on doing everything myself because I value the role of the artist's hand so much in the process. But that means I have to learn it personally in order to do it.

Populism in contemporary art can become a dirty word. There is this notion that to not be understood is a reflection of depth. I'm sure this is true in some cases, but on the whole I can't accept this as a vision of art. There's something so cynical about assuming your audience is unintelligent or that artists shouldn't care about their viewers.

To understand something changing form as a destructive act is a very modern, Western gut reaction to things, and I get it. But what I'm suggesting is nothing radical, this notion of things constantly changing, and that the change is not inherently destructive.

I want the strangeness and weirdness and incomprehensibility of life that art can reflect so well, but I want it to feel like a mystery that is inviting us in. Sagan's great art lesson for me was generosity of wonder and making curiosity contagious.

Alteration is a constructive act, not a destructive one, and it's the opposite of most of our impulses.