Gold

Gold examines colour as an economic and political symbol. Its eleven inverted figures draw their poses from the sculptural pediment on the façade of the New York Stock Exchange. At the centre, Mercury, the god of commerce, is reimagined as a woman, part of the work’s wider transformation of inherited identities and symbols of power. The figure connects financial power with the authority of classical mythology. Spriggs overturns this structure in an iconoclastic gesture, challenging its authority through the reversal of its own symbols.

The triangular composition recalls the global wealth pyramid, in which resources and influence become concentrated among a few. Pointing downwards, it also echoes the stock market symbol for falling value. The inverted figures resonate with pittura infamante, the historical practice of depicting condemned subjects upside down as a form of public disgrace. Here, that gesture is directed at a system of value.

Gold lends the figures an appearance of wealth and authority, yet their ghostly presence unsettles the solidity associated with monumental sculpture. Bodies that embody institutional power become luminous apparitions. Radiant colour and monumental scale attract the gaze, while the elusive figures suggest how economic authority depends on belief, prestige and collective recognition.