Richard Bright: Can we begin by you saying something about your background?

Judith Alder: Sure. I was born on Tyneside, the youngest of three. When I was at primary school my teenage sister, 13 years my senior, was training to be a radiographer and I would occasionally visit her in the radiography department when she was on call at weekends. The x-ray images I saw and the images in her textbooks really fuelled my interest in the workings of the body and I found the ghostly images beautiful and seductive. I also vividly remember the joy of copying diagrams into my biology exercise book and explaining the reproductive organs of a flower to a bored teenage brother. Despite this early interest in science, nature and anatomy, I rebelled against academia and left school part-way through my A-levels, drawn by the idea of earning money and gaining my independence. Ironically, the A-level subjects I started – Biology, Physical Geography and English all play some part in my arts practice now, and my lack of success in other science subjects at school (I could never get to grips with chemistry and physics) has prompted me to try to improve my knowledge of these subjects more recently.

My first career at 17 was as a dental nurse. In my 20s I moved into local government where I worked until the birth of our children. A natural career break then offered the opportunity to try something different, and with huge support from my family, I eventually ended up at art college in Brighton where I studied BA Fine Art Printmaking. I’ve worked as an artist ever since graduating in 2003 and have taken a pro-active stance, leading numerous artist-led projects, exhibitions and other initiatives over the past 20 years, and working hard to represent and support other artists in a precarious profession which has such an undefined career path.

RB: What is the underlying focus of your work? In particular, what are the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide your artistic research?

JA: I suppose in the broadest possible sense my work is a way of trying to understand more about things which can provoke difficult questions, with a particular focus on the life sciences. This can mean learning about practical things such as advances in biomedical science or, as in the case of my current project, more theoretical questions such as ‘what is life?’; or it can be more focused on ethical or philosophical questions like ‘what difference would it make if we never died?’. However, I’m certainly no expert in any of the fields I’m interested in. I feel an affinity with artist Camille Henrot who says, ‘As an artist, I have the freedom to browse through ideas with the curiosity of the amateur. I’m allowed to have an irrational approach to knowledge, which is a privilege I appreciate a lot’. I agree – it is absolutely a privilege to be able to set one’s own agenda and pursue an open-ended enquiry. I also value the fact that experts in their field, such as scientists and ethicists, are often very open to working with artists and I have had some great experiences of wonderfully insightful collaborations with open-minded professionals across disciplines and professions.

As a subject develops into a question in my mind my first approach is always to read, listen and talk to experts about my inquiry. I usually have two relevant books on the go at any one time – one fiction and one non-fiction. I tend to dip in and out of science books and there are several that have given me a really good foundation for my projects, for example, Dr Adam Rutherford’s book, Creation: The Origin of Life and The Future of Life and Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene, have both influenced the work I’ve been making in the last few years. Occasionally a sentence or phrase will stand out, for example Dawkins’ theories about the improbability of the creation of life – an occurrence he says “so improbable as to be considered impossible when thought of in the context of the lifetime of a man”.

I also place a lot of importance on reading fiction which is relevant to the subjects I’m exploring, especially sci-fi or speculative fiction set in a near future and created by well-informed writers. I’ve just finished reading The Secret of Life by biologist Paul McAuley, a sci-fi novel which explores multiple themes including the possibility of life on Mars and the implications of that life being brought back to Earth. It’s an interesting read on many levels because it covers subjects from the control and ownership of knowledge to the physical difficulties of space travel to origin of life theories, gene editing and more, and is written from an expert perspective.

I glean a lot of information from the media and like to listen to science programmes and podcasts and enjoy the accessible and sometimes light-hearted approach adopted by science communicators like Professor Jim Al-Kalili and Dr Adam Rutherford and the clarity they can bring to very complex subjects. Reith Lectures by eminent surgeon and writer, Dr Atul Gawande, and gerontologist, Professor Tom Kirkwood, along with many TED talks and YouTube lectures have also been a rich source of knowledge, information and opinion.

RB: Have there been any particular influences to your ideas and work?

JA: Over the years my work has been through numerous incarnations. My BA work 20 years ago imitated scientific process and knowledge to make artworks which represented a psychological and emotional interior through pseudo-anatomical objects. Each object had a complex hidden core which I revealed in diagrams and x-rays, and the work was shown in a laboratory-like installation called The Discovery Room. This work was heavily influenced by Leonardo da Vinci’s anatomical investigations, including his dissection and anatomical drawing processes and his search for ‘the seat of the soul’ within the physical body.

Drawing from ‘The Discovery Room’

View from ‘The Discovery Room’ installation

Later, by the time of my MA in 2010 the work had become more about how we feel about science and technology and the difficult ethical dilemmas created through scientific progress. I focused particularly on the complex questions around genetic modification and presented an installation called The Golden Seed, based on a short story I wrote which sat somewhere between sci-fi and fairy-tale but grounded in the facts of scientific progress at that time.

View from ‘The Golden Seed’ installation

‘The Golden Seed’

During my MA research I was reading John Wyndham, Day of the Triffids, Trouble With Lichen and The Midwich Cuckoos. I’m fascinated by visionary writers who have written speculative fiction which often seems timelessly and disturbingly accurate for example H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, E M Forster’s The Machine Stops, Huxley’s Brave New World, Ballard’s The Drowned World.

British bioethicist and philosopher, Professor John Harris’ book Enhancing Evolution and Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow were impactful, especially Harari’s suggestion that the previously long, slow process of evolution is now on the brink of huge change as humans acquire the capability to manufacture new genomes and new life forms in an age of scientific and technological ‘miracles’. I’m also fascinated by Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go which explores cloning and the breeding of humans for ‘spare parts’ and Klara and the Sun which tells the story of Klara, an AI ‘friend’ and her relationship with the human child she was bought to accompany and ultimately replace. Most recently I have been reading Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table which for me powerfully sums up the interconnectedness of all things in his essay on Carbon, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris which explores the idea of a planet covered by a single living organism in the form of an intelligent sea, ‘a protoplasmic ocean-brain enveloping the entire planet’.

During 2013-2016 I ran a project which became a real milestone for me. Called The New Immortals, it focused on the question ‘what would happen if we never died?’ and explored ideas about the prospect of extended life or even immortality through advances in science and technology. During this project I was really privileged to collaborate with some fantastic academics and scientists, especially Professor Bobbie Farsides, Professor of Clinical and Biomedical Ethics at the Brighton & Sussex Medical School, and Professor Matteo Santin, Director of the Brighton Centre for Regenerative Medicine and Devices. Both people, experts in their own fields, were exceptionally influential, introducing me to people, ideas, experiences and discussions which helped direct and inform my work. They also worked with me to develop an excellent series of public events which accompanied an exhibition of work by myself and ten other artists which I curated at Phoenix Arts in Brighton in 2016.

‘In Praise of Renewal’ installation view at The New Immortals exhibition

‘In Praise of Renewal’ hymnsheet at The New Immortals exhibition

In Praise of Renewal

RB: You have worked on projects that involve setting yourself a challenge and limitations, I’m thinking particularly of String Theory and Other Things and Signs of Life. Can you say more about these projects?

JA: Both String Theory and Other Things I Don’t Understand, and Signs of Life introduced a new way of working which changed my work development process in quite a radical way. During spring 2020 when we were all adapting to the first Covid lockdown, I took part in an online project called 30 works/30 days in which artists across the world were invited to make a new piece of work every day during April and post it online to a dedicated website. At the time, adapting to a life of isolation and limited resources, and with galleries closed and public projects banned, this was an attractive way of keeping in touch with other artists and introducing a structure to daily practice. For the project, I pledged to improve my digital animation skills and make a short animation each day, using only the materials and resources available to me at that time i.e., simple drawing materials, paper, and my phone camera. I had previously been experimenting with ways of ‘bringing my work to life’ and animation seemed to be a great way to do this. It turned out to be quite a challenge as animation is a time-consuming process. Each day I made a sequence of drawings with minute changes which were photographed at every stage and the drawings (sometimes as many as a hundred) were then put through a simple animation programme to bring them alive. I admit that some days the work I submitted to the project was not particularly successful! But at the end of the month, I had a handful of works called collectively ‘Signs of Life’ which I considered worth developing further.

Signs of Life: Sculb (aggressive rhizome)

As well as providing a useful structure during that extraordinary time, I quickly realised that the intense focus, discipline and continuity of making a new work every day is a great way for me to develop small or short works which can feed into larger projects. The limitations I impose upon myself are also useful: a common problem for many artists including myself is too much choice! So, when the 30 works/30 days project was repeated in April 2021 I was keen to take part again. This time I decided to make the project part of a learning process once more, but this time the learning was not about artistic process, but about science knowledge. I was reading about origin of life theories and decided to try to tackle my poor knowledge of chemistry and physics and attempt to better understand some of the complex atomic and molecular structures and processes I was reading about. While reflecting on each day’s reading I would make a drawing within a very limited set of rules: each drawing to be on square paper, 25cm x 25cm, using black ink, and a continuous line.

Images from the String Theory series

My aim was not to make drawings which in anyway depicted the structures I was trying to understand, instead they would simply be informed by some of the concepts my brain was struggling with and build upon the notion of the complex chains, strings, meshes and networks which form us and all matter. The series of drawings became more varied as the days progressed, and sometimes the continuous line was broken, but at the end of the month the series, String Theory and Other Things I Don’t Understand, consisted of 30 drawings which successfully represented the process I’d been through. I continue to use the 25cm x 25cm ink on paper format to develop new drawings for the series, though I’ve now abandoned the continuous line and allow other marks to come into the drawings[viii].

Image from The String Theory series

RB: Can you say something about your recent solo show, Vital Signs? What are its aims and what does it involve?

JA: Working through earlier projects the question ‘what is life in the 21^st century?’ kept cropping up in my mind. Now that we live in a time when scientists can create and manipulate biological life, when technology can create artificial life, when some things are neither dead nor alive and others seem to take on a life of their own, the boundary between life and non-life doesn’t seem clear. I’ve also been thinking about how our understanding is limited by our own experience and am intrigued by the suggestion in Solaris, that in our search for extra-terrestrial life, we might not even recognise an alternative life-form as being alive if it didn’t fit within our experience of biological life.

These questions led to the feeling of a need to go back to basics and try to better understand the science of life as we know it and especially Richard Dawkins theory that life in its simplest form might have first occurred on Earth as ‘an improbable accident’ … resulting in a combination of molecules not only stable enough to survive, but also able to replicate, ‘evolving from simple clusters of proteins to form the complex ecosystems we recognise today’.

‘Clusterform’

The prospect of a solo show where I could bring together key elements of work from each of the projects I’ve undertaken over the past 10 years feels like a great way of ‘summing up’ and bringing this part of my enquiry to some sort of small conclusion. The work I’m showing at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) in Birmingham includes animations from the Signs of Life series, drawings from the String Theory series, works relating to my Clusterforms, as well as new large-scale drawings and collages, some slightly comical ‘boulders’ which sit in a gap somewhere between sculpture and village hall amateur dramatics stage scenery, and a new moving image work called The Sickness of The Stones.

New collage as yet untitled

Still from video ‘The Sickness of the Stones’

As with all my work, one of the main aims for the exhibition is to provide opportunities for people to come and talk about some of the big questions I’ve been exploring; to promote conversations which often lead on to another step in my learning journey, and to think about how what we learn today might help us envisage a better future. To provide these opportunities for conversation, I’m spending a lot of time in the gallery during the ten days of the exhibition. I’m working live in the gallery for five days making a new wall drawing called L.U.C.A. (A Very Dangerous Idea) based around the idea that all life as we know it has developed from one original life source. The drawing grows from a single mark which splits into two branches and each branch continues to split into two. Of course, this can’t go on forever – some areas become overcrowded, and the branches die out. In my mind, this echoes the process of evolution where some lines of evolutionary development thrive while others do not.

Wall drawing work in progress. Still from video

As work for the show has developed I’ve become increasingly preoccupied with the apparent interconnectedness of all things and in Carl Sagan’s proposal that ‘we are literally made of star stuff’ – that is that all the elements which form the planet and everything in it (including us) have originated from a single cosmic event. This theory, reinforced by Primo Levi’s excellent depiction of the carbon cycle in The Periodic Table, is represented in the exhibition in the form of drawn networks and meshes which recur throughout many of the works. It is further reinforced through events which are being led by evolutionary biologist and complexity scientist, Dr Alexandra Penn and artist/poet Lee Mackenzie during the exhibition. Lee is a Birmingham-based artist who is running free family workshops which will extend these themes, working with individuals and groups from the local community to map connections between people and their geographic links. He is also collaborating with complexity scientist, Alex Penn, on an event which will explore ‘the city as organism’ offering alternative perspectives on the subject of complex networks and ecosystems through a creative walk and poetry-mapping workshop.

I’m also giving a talk about the exhibition and hosting five informal lunch-time chat sessions in the gallery when people can drop in for conversation about any aspect of the work and its themes. There will be opportunities for people to explore in more depth the background to the work, including a short video featuring some of the previous works which have fed into the project, and incorporating a reading space in the gallery with some of the books which have influenced me, as well as a collection of smaller drawings, objects and images which represent some of my research journey. I hope this will really add something to the experience of those visitors who want to engage with the work in more depth and encourage people to make their own connections and follow up the strands they’re interested in.

RB: Your art explores how things form, grow and evolve. How has your artwork changed over the past years?

JA: I have come to view my practice as a process which in some ways mirrors processes of evolution and metamorphosis, as the work I make responds to time and place, conditions, and resources. The evolving nature of the work has become more pronounced recently as I have begun to be more aware of the need to be conscious of the materials I use, and where possible not to create more objects in a world which already has too many. If I can transform an old work into a new work without using more materials, so much the better, so I often revisit and re-configure past work into new forms. An example is my work around clusters. I began by making small cluster forms from modelling material which gradually evolved into larger life-size clusters using recycled packaging materials during an experimental residency titled Blood Music (referencing a book by Greg Bear). Returning to these works later, I subjected the giant clusters to a very physical process in which I manhandled them, crushing and binding them, transforming the loose, spongy clusters into tight, dense amorphous forms I call Clustermorphs. The physicality of the process seems to echo some of the metamorphic forces of nature.

‘Cluster Portrait’

‘Blood Music’ installation view

‘Clustermorph’

I also like to use the processes of nature to help finish my works. The boulders I’m showing in the Vital Signs exhibition were actually made around three years ago and through necessity and lack of storage space have lived in my garden for all of that time. Nature has definitely added something to their surface patina which has improved them!

RB: What future projects are you currently working on?

JA: Last year I was commissioned by a Sussex vineyard to make a series of drawings for labels for one of their wines. They’ve now asked me to work with them again in 2023 as their resident artist and I’m looking forward to being able to spend more time in the vineyard learning about the complex eco-systems involved in viticulture and soil care and exploring the connections with my recent work. Other than that, I’ll be trying to set aside some time to pause and reflect on where the work should go next. There is a danger that the pressures of being an artist force you into rushing from one project to the next without time to stop, so a short pause is something I always try to factor in after the culmination of a big project. I dare say the reflective process will probably involve the start of a new 30 works/30 days project and the beginning of an exciting new cycle in the work.

Dead or Alive

………………………………………

Vital Signs: complex networks, meshes and entanglements

Tues 14 to Sat 25 February 2023 Venue: RBSA Gallery, Birmingham, B3 1SA

https://www.judithalder.com/vitalsigns

…………………..

www.judithalder.com

All images copyright and courtesy of Judith Alder

Art, Creativity, Culture, Installation, Sculpture