Elizabeth Price Speaks at Space Conference

On December 6, Elizabeth Price made a presentation with Invisible Dust Director and Curator Alice Sharp on ‘Contemporary art and space science’ at the 8th Appleton Space Conference hosted by the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), where she is currently the first artist in residence.

Price’s residency was set up by Invisible Dust with Space Scientist Dr Hugh Mortimer and is funded by the Leverhulme Foundation. At The conference Alice Sharp presented Invisible Dust’s art-science projects including with Jeremy Deller and Dryden Goodwin this year. Elizabeth Price spoke about her previous works and experiences working with scientists from RAL.  Her space science research is currently focused around solar images and the resulting video will be shown in 2013/14.

Elizabeth Price had won this year’s Turner Prize just three days before and spoke with the website Imperica during the conference about the award and her work at the Laboratory.

Here is part of her interview:

“One of the things that I’m really interested in is, as an artist, entering a situation that I know nothing about,” she says. “I’m starting off by looking at the sun, but I may not end up there, because if you know nothing, then you don’t know where to start. […] This is where I’m at – I have gathered some material, and I’ll be re-photographing some of the glass-plate photographs of the sun from the late 19th and early 20th centuries on a lightbox.”

During her Turner Prize acceptance speech, Price praised the comprehensive school she attended, and stated that her career so far would have been “unimaginable” without public support for the arts:

“My undergraduate and postgraduate courses were funded.” “If they were not, then I would not have studied art in the first place, because I didn’t think about its application as a job. I chose art for its subject, not for its utility value. The prospect is, now, that people will start a postgraduate course with £50k of debt. There aren’t many people that will be able to do that. It’s incredibly depressing.”