British conceptual artist Kate Daudy, best known for her public interventions and large-scale sculptures, has exhibited worldwide. Most recently, she has been energized by a fruitful collaboration with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Kostya Novoselov. Together, they have created interventions, films, and exhibitions. We spoke with Daudy from her home base in London about the scientific ideas she finds exciting, her collaborations across disciplines, and what she’s most excited about working on next.
Science & Film: As an artist, how did you become interested in science?
Kate Daudy: I was very bad at maths and science at school. I never really thought about it until I had this crisis of faith after I did a project with refugees, where I went around all these refugee camps and met people who seemed to be telling me that our life is what our thoughts make it. And so then I was like, well, if our lives are what our thoughts make it, that's pretty subjective. There must be some concrete fact that underpins all of this subjectivity—even if it's just the fact that we're all rearranged particles of carbon that have no meaning. So I went and spent some time at the CERN in Geneva, and spent some time with the theoretical physicists there, asking them a million questions. And then I went to the Millennium Seed Bank, and I was looking at plants and the beginning of nature and talking to scientists. And then this friend of mine said, oh, you should meet this very interesting physicist who's always asking questions like this, and you'll get along very well. So I met this physicist who is called Kostya Novoselov and we just got along like a house on fire. He was the most un-reassuring person I've ever come across because he opened my eyes to the fact that at the end of every imaginable question, there're just more questions. We'd have these terrible conversations where I'd say, two and two is four. And he'd be like, well... So everything just became even more complicated, and therefore, less complicated in a way because I felt relieved and freed by this lack of knowledge that I had.
So now I'm really passionate about science. I've spent a lot of time with Kostya working on different art and science projects, some of which have been made into films.
Kostya Novoselov and Kate Daudy, courtesy of the artist
S&F: So science didn't have the answers, it had more questions, but you fell in love with science. Can you speak a bit more about why you pursued the collaboration with Kostya?
KD: Every time we talk, we come up with ten ideas. We get really excited about them and start working on them immediately. It might be a project illustrating purity of intent because I think we are so interested in what we're doing it's like a pair of puppies in a basket kind of thing. I think it also really helps that Kostya is a very well qualified physicist and so science people are really happy to help him and then art people, obviously not all art people, but some art people, are quite interested in these projects that look at ideas and concepts in a new way. Like, writing on sheep or filling a tree with hundreds and hundreds of bells and chimes that we've made with this incredible guy from Sheffield... It brings a lot of joy, you know, these projects, so the moment that we've started on one, we're thinking about another one. It's a bit like a cheese rolling down a hill.
S&F: I've never heard that analogy!
KD: [laughs] Maybe it doesn't exist.
S&F: You mentioned writing on sheep. Can you tell me a bit about that project?
KD: We made four films with the sheep. The project in itself wasn't conceived of to be a film. The original idea was that we would write on sheep. The difference between random numbers and chaos was the beginning of the conversation that led to making this sheep film. We were sitting in Yorkshire at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and they had this beautiful flock of sheep that walks around amongst the sculptures, and the visitors all interact with the sheep and the sculptures. Kostya was explaining to me about this institute in America which creates one random number every two minutes. There’s a whole bunch of incredibly qualified PhD guys who create one random number every two minutes. And these random numbers are extremely difficult to make, because one random number can't follow on from another, because then it's not random. You can crack the code. And these numbers are used for banking and security and coding and inside your telephone. Random numbers are randomly super useful.
So, he's explaining this to me at great length. My eye is wandering over to the sheep, so I was like, what if we randomly wrote numbers on the sides of the sheep, and then the people wandering around this beautiful sculpture park randomly, would randomly see different arrangements of sheep who are roaming around, and that would create an awful lot of random numbers, and there's no control over what the sheep are going to do. So there would be no pattern that would be easy to crack.
So we asked the curator at the sculpture park, and she was very enthusiastic. Then we asked the shepherd. We got 250 sheep into their sheep pen, and I wrote on them, and then the Department of Physics from Manchester University came and looked at the sheep and said, Oh, yes, you've created more random numbers in a month with these sheep than there are atoms in this universe. And so we were just really thrilled. So then we were like, ah, we should make a film because otherwise nobody would ever see it. So then we made one film, which was the film that you can see of the sheep randomly roaming around. Although they were a bit organized in this film, they're less random than they were at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Then we made like a making of which explains the concept behind the other film. And then we got to work with the greatest cellist in the world who's this guy called Steven Isserlis, who adapted a piece of music from John Tavener called “The Lamb.” He came and played his beautiful, beautiful cello to the sheep with numbers on. And so we made this other film also with the sheep. And then we made another sheep film, illustrating Einstein's theory of unification in Segovia that was commissioned by the Spanish government and by the Hay Festival, which shows that two groups of people with an opposing view can get along. We did an entire takeover of the city of Segovia for a day and drove these nearly 500 sheep across the plains of Castile into Segovia. And then the shepherd got them to go round and round in a circle. It was just so beautiful. So these are sheep science films.
S&F: That's a new genre. [laughs] How important is it to you for people to understand the process and how you got to the ultimate performance or action is that you're documenting in the film?
KD: I think it's really important because otherwise it's not so interesting. For me, you know, personally, I see this film, and I think, lots of sheep with numbers on. But if you have the story of why and how it was made, it's super interesting. I think that art can be a very good conduit for ideas and concepts that people might not give much thought to. But if they do, if they take the time to think about it, it's sort of joyful. I think anything more that we can understand about our universe, and the world around us, and how things work and how other people think and see things is something that is a positive contribution to our understanding of one another, which is, I think, one of the functions of art.
S&F: What's been inspiring to you and Kostya recently?
KD: As a result of those sheep we made a completely surrealistic film, where we unloaded a load of videos from our phone and numbered them, then we pulled out numbers from the sheep, and lined them up with the numbers of the videos that we'd pulled off our phone. And then we coded them with a sound and had an amazing opera singer sing according to the numbers on the sheep and the images on the film. That was quite an interesting film just illustrating a point about randomness.
Now we're making our next film. We've found a guy in Nottingham who has a weightless vacuum box. So inside this box, you can recreate the conditions of outer space. We're putting inside a spoonful of honey, and then we're going to put microphones in and read poems to the glob of honey, and film the shapes that the honey forms according to each poem, and then each poem will be represented by this moving sphere of honey sort of changing form. That we're going to show at the Lorca Center in Grenada. And we're going to read Lorca poems, and we're getting Lorca's niece to come and read the poems to the honey. And it's just so magic, it's just completely great, because I would never know about this weightless vacuum box, Kostya, I'm not sure he was a big fan of Lorca before we all started on this, and together we're doing this really wonderful science and art film project. One of the cinematographers is this guy called Gautier Deblonde who's quite a distinguished cinematographer.
I kind of feel like why I love being an artist is just meeting interesting people, meeting you. I'm just here in my little rooms, and now I'm learning about the world. It's so exciting. And that's one of the things that's wonderful about cinema and about film. You can be literally just sitting in your little room. Trying to make films, as we have been doing, has taught me a lot about the medium of cinema, and what a responsibility the film director has as an individual, and also what a privilege it is to be able to work in this medium because it's so powerful.
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