Amartey Golding makes chainmail sculptures that are seductive, threatening, funny, and deeply unsettling all at once. And in this conversation, he explains why discomfort might be one of the most important tools an artist has.
Raised between London, Ghana, Rastafarian culture, council estates, and rural England, Amartey speaks with rare honesty about growing up between identities and how that tension became the emotional engine of his work.
In this conversation, you’ll hear how he learned to trust discomfort as part of his creative language, why audience feedback became essential to sharpening his voice, and how he creates installations that work not just intellectually, but viscerally — through sound, light, atmosphere, scale, and the body itself.
We talk about the emotional labour behind ambitious projects, the crash that can come after making large-scale work, and why sustainability, family life, and building a nourishing environment now matter as much to him as artistic ambition.
But perhaps most importantly, this episode offers a powerful lesson in how to develop your own artistic voice: not by trying to become someone else, but by listening more deeply to the contradictions, histories, and instincts already living inside you.
This one is rich, layered, funny, tender, and deeply human. I can’t wait for you to hear it.
