Katie Paterson
Tate Modern and the Institute of Physics recently got together to curate a series of events entitled Light and Dark Matters, which saw leading artists and scientists, philosophers and theorists debating our contemporary experience of light, darkness and dark matter
at the event, we caught up with Katie Paterson, a Berlin-based visual artist working at the intersection of art and science. Katie was part of the discussion “Are we darkened by light?” – which examined the effects of light pollution on our experience of the night sky
do you think we are darkened by light? we are certainly darkened by everyday light on Earth. the most intense experiences that I’ve personally had with darkness, stars and cosmic phenomena have been in the absence of electrical light – whether that was in a desert wilderness, or at an observatory on a mountaintop; looking way beyond. we’re surrounded by so much urban electrical light everywhere we go, with our phones and our screens. humans respond much better to natural rhythms of sunlight and darkness, so the closer we get to that way of living, the better
when you’re working with scientists, have you ever surprised a scientist? I have surprised scientists with just about everything I’ve done! I’ve surprised a scientist from CALTEC in California who was researching the very, very dark era in the universe. I wanted to use a picture of this ‘ancient darkness’ to project on TV at midnight. to him, the images of nothing aren’t very interesting if you’re looking to reveal something, but I was looking for something else, I wanted to reveal something very different. for him it was a negative research, but for me, looking at nothing is inspiring
what is your relationship to handmaking and material, tangible objects? a lot of what I do is conceptual and ideas-based. I do miss the handcrafting of things. when I planted the Future Library forest, I enjoyed the physicality of planting the trees – seeing them grow is really inspiring. sometimes the production of my works crush me a little. I tend to have a really clear idea of what I want to produce from the beginning and it doesn’t always work out that way. in the case of All The Dead Stars(pictured above) I clearly imagined its scale and its weight and the kind of materials, and it was really hard to produce – finding metal that is 3x2 metres and a laser-cutting bed that size
can you say something about Fossil Necklace and its relationship to our perception of time? I really enjoyed working with the fossils, and they were interesting in relation to the object making materials you asked about. the necklace maps human beings in a vast timescale relationship – the beads work their way through a circle in a passage through geological time. the necklace is carved out from the most ancient single celled organisms to all life that came after, like the first fish to come out of the sea to the land, the first beings to develop wings to the first flowers to create colour on the planet. it’s representative of my existence, our existence, the existence of human beings and everything that has come before us to create us
do you think that the advancement of astronomy and science has had a philosophical impact on our culture? definitely, it’s got to have had an impact – whether we’ve caught up with it yet I don’t know! the advancement of science and technology is progressing at such an incredibly rapid speed. there are concepts that we only have a limited understanding of. what is it to look at a time before Earth existed? that is so beyond rational thinking, but yet we are faced with those questions in the field of astronomy
I think there’s got to be a limit to our knowledge. I also think it’s really important that there is still a place for the unknown. there’s a constant quest for knowledge and progress but for me the mysterious and the unknown is what really activates my mind and imagination. our brains are incredible machines that can take our minds to extremely distant places, but of course as human beings, we have limits. the universe is a completely unfathomable, infinite thing where space and time warp and contain particles that exist in two completely different places in the universe at the same time. how do we conceive of this?
being alive today with all the knowledge and technology that currently exists can definitely allow us to reflect on who we are and how we relate to the rest of the universe. now we know that there are billions of other stars and potential for other life throughout the universe – it’s got to have some kind of expansive relationship to how we think about ourselves