NEUTRON STAR

Neutron star expresses the beauty of creation, using gold to represent the birth of something new. Whether it is the beauty of a new-born child or simply the beauty of love, Ashley’s work symbolises how two people must completely change, often destroying who they were in order to create something new and precious.    

The reason that Ashley has used gold in particular to represent this phenomenon is that gold has the most incredible story of creation he has ever heard.

The story starts when a star at least five times as massive as our sun dies in a supernova explosion leaving nothing behind but a neutron star of ultra dense material.

These neutron stars are so heavy that their gravitation pull will pull other stars towards them, moving whole galaxies. When two neutron stars start pulling together they spiral closer and closer together until they smash into each other in an explosion a million times as bright as the sun. The violent collision produces cosmic ripples powerful enough to stretch and squeeze the fabric of the universe.

Only in this explosion is gold created. It is then spread across space in a plume of matter, dusting distant planets with gold.

So for all the precious metal we have on earth today, two suns of other solar systems had to die and collide. The true price for all the gold we have on earth is the life of those two solar systems.