(Originally published on the UMd.studio Journal, 18th May 2016)
Take a stroll along the corridors of Somerset House and you may come across Totality. An original installation by British artist Katie Paterson, it's one of eight new commissions to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the Arts Council Collection. It’s also part of Somerset House’s Utopia 2016: A Year of Imagination and Possibility, a year of events celebrating the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s work.
Totality is a large mirrorball, 80cm in diameter, featuring images of almost every solar eclipse that’s been documented by mankind. Each image has been desaturated, printed onto one of 10,000 mirror tiles and arranged in a complex sequence that mirrors the real movement of the moon eclipsing the sun. Standing in the room is a dizzying, disorientating experience. Illuminated by two light-sources, the mirrorball slowly spins on its axis, scattering the reflected images onto the walls, floor and ceiling to mesmerising effect.
Sourcing the images was a huge project and Katie and her team searched for months. Much of the heavy lifting was done via the Internet, and the sources for the images were diverse. Many of the images come from photo-sharing websites such as Flickr, amateur photographs taken using the most basic of equipment and featuring details such as people, urban skylines, birds and seascapes. Others are the view through the lenses of high-tech telescopes peering out across the universe. Some images have been taken from news broadcasts, and some, the earliest dating back to 1778, are hand-drawn, predating the invention of photography.
Although her subject matter teeters on the very brink of scientific knowledge, Katie’s background is in Fine Art - ‘I’m not even scientific in the way that I think’, she claims. Curiosity is the driver of her work, and she’s been artist in residence in the Astrophysics department of University College London and at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge. Every project she embarks upon demands an immense degree of research and specialist knowledge:
Every single time I start a new work, it involves a different medium. I never seem to learn my lesson! Even something that appears on the surface to be discreet and minimal requires a rigorous amount of research. A lot goes into it, and it takes a lot of time.
Candle (From Earth into a Black Hole) might seem minimal on the surface, but scratch beneath this and you’ll discover that Katie worked with bio-chemists and perfumers to create a 23-layered candle which burnt down over the course of 12 hours, taking us on an olfactory adventure through space. Travelling upward through the atmosphere (‘water, humidity, wet basement, washed towels’) and onward to the Moon (‘burnt gunpowder’), the Sun and the planets, and eventually into an odourless black hole, the scents were developed based upon abstract descriptions of each part of the solar system.
In Earth-Moon-Earth, scent is replaced by sound as Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is translated into morse code and sent to the moon via radio transmission, before being bounced back to the Earth, re-translated into a new score. Back on Earth, Vatnajökull (the sound of) saw Katie submerge a microphone in the lagoon of an Icelandic glacier to capture the sounds of the melting ice.
From Iceland, back to London. Not only is Somerset House the location of her latest installation, but it’s also the new home for Katie's studio, a team of three, herself included. In fact, the studio is located directly beneath the room housing Totality, giving Katie the unique opportunity to carry out all kinds of tests in-situ ahead of the final installation.
Like much of Katie’s work, Totality is about nature in the broadest sense, focusing not just on earthly matters, but on the extended nature of the universe and the wider cosmos, serving to remind us of the small space we occupy in the larger scheme.
Totality is at Somerset House until Sunday 22nd May, after which time it will be on display at The Lowry in Manchester as part of Syzygy, a major exhibition of Katie's work until 17th July, 2016.Ready to read more? Meet another creative K, fashion and textile designer Kitty Joseph.
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Photography: Sasha Zyryaev, Katie Paterson Studio