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.

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 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.

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 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.

As many glaciers are melting and icy tundras are decaying, there's an unprecedented amount of woolly mammoth material that's becoming dislodged from the ice. Not just mammoth, but all kinds of fossils from the past. What occurred to me was, had anyone tried to pinpoint the first case of human-induced extinction? What was the first time we as species pushed another one to oblivion? I would argue that's probably going to be one of the defining moral problems of the century, human-induced extinction. And I really wanted to know, when did we first cross that barrier?

Even if the effort is bound to fail you still commit completely. It is the commitment that counts for something.