The conditions for creation

An interview with Deborah Davidson

Both artists and scientists ideate and explore. But Deborah Davidson, artist and founder of Catalyst Conversations, draws another parallel: both design the right conditions for creation. Talking about a spontaneous performance during a gallery program she curated, she says, “I can’t control these outcomes, but I can make the conditions for them.” Just as a scientist ensures their hypothesis is measurable and testable, that the data can’t be tainted, so too an artist sets themselves and their communities up for generation and discovery.

We admire the community you’ve built between the arts and sciences through Catalyst Conversations, whose mission is much like the Napkin’s own. What inspired you to create this organization? What challenges and victories have you experienced throughout its evolution?

12 years ago, I kept noticing fellow artists in the Boston area who were also interested in the sciences—biology or physics or black holes. I wasn’t inspired by those subjects, but I was fascinated that others were. I ran into a woman named Clara Wainwright at somebody's gallery opening, and when I told her what I'd been noticing she said to me, “I think it would be great to have something like a TED-talk program for the arts and sciences.”

That's how it was born. Clara is an artist, but she’s also interested in community. She invented First Night, for example, which happens all over the country on New Year's Eve.

Over the course of a year, she mentored me, introduced me to people and then all of a sudden, we had this project which launched in October 2012.

I will tell you, frankly, that I didn't know what I was doing. I had this idea, and I wanted it to be free and open to the public. But since it began, it’s been supported by so many moments of synergy.

We did one of our first programs at the Broad Institute. Since then, I’ve also collaborated with the List Visual Arts Center. We often try to align the speakers with the venue. The Broad, for example, has an artist-in-residence program. So sometimes our talks at the Broad have been with these interdisciplinary artists.

I always feel like I've opened a door, and I didn't know that door was even there for me. And, as you know, it's exciting to be at the table with really smart people. I make a joke that I’m earning my own PhD—not by going to school, but by talking to others and doing my own research before each conversation.

I've also been inspired my whole life by my grandmother who was a medical doctor in Italy around 1923, at the forefront of all kinds of things. We used to read together, non-fiction science writings, and that memory has stayed with me.

We were moved by this line in your artist’s statement: “What I want to do with the work is impossible; I want mute objects to speak.” This idea of the ineffable reminds us of conversations we’ve had with physicists who share the limits of what equations and theorems can explain. What do you think the arts can tell the sciences and vice versa?

I think of scientists such as Alan Lightman, who we had on Catalyst twice. He's both a physicist and a writer. I'm reading his book now called The Transcendent Brain, and he talks about how we’re hardwired to think about the spirit, something ineffable that we can’t describe. Scientists who are exploring black holes or the deep ocean, things that are hard to see or understand, are doing what artists do, just from a different perspective.

Before I interviewed Alan, I drove out to his house and we spoke for a while. As I was leaving, he said to me, “Deborah, you're doing God's work.” And I thought, well, now I have to keep doing this because Alan Lightman thinks I should!

I'm a visual artist, so I started the conversations with other visual artists. Since then, I’ve also done programs with poets, musicians, dancers—a range of people working in the arts. Often, their work is supported by research into the sciences.

For example, we had a dancer, Jody Weber, who was thinking about trees. So during our program, we asked the audience to dance like trees! It’s such a human thing to experience with your body. In another, we brought Stan Strickland, who's a marvelous musician, in conversation with Ani Patel, who's a neuroscientist, to talk about music and the brain. During the conversation, they stopped talking and started singing, and the audience was singing too. It was amazing.

With topics as diverse as geometry and dreams, how do you curate the subjects of each conversations?

Speaking of dreams, sometimes I dream words and phrases. But, like a puzzle, they’re not always in order. One morning, I woke up to this phrase, “poetry and the ocean,” and I thought that was a great idea for conversation. So I asked Robert Pinsky, who agreed to be a part of it, and Stefan Helmreich, a cultural anthropologist who studies scientists who studied the ocean.

For the program, Pinsky chose eight poems from over the centuries that had something to do with the ocean or the sea and recited each poem like a performance. Then Stefan responded to the content of the poems to explain what people knew about the ocean during each time-period, which also brought climate change into the conversation.

In many cases, I meet or read about somebody who's doing interesting work. The Broad Institute specializes in infectious disease research, for example, so this spring we're going to talk about the heart as a metaphor and the heart as an organ.

How have you incorporated the sciences—whether materially or conceptually—into your own art?

I've been sort of consumed with wanting mute objects to speak. I’m not easily an outward person, and if I weren’t an artist, I feel I would have wanted to be an ice skater or something. But I ended up being an object maker, and like many artists I put all my energy into the process which creates an object to be looked at.

It takes a fair amount of effort since I’m naturally quiet and private. I might not be thinking about black holes when I work, but I am thinking about materiality and conception. I've heard other artists say that we create our own conditions for discovery, and maybe that’s a parallel to scientists working at a hypothesis.

You describe your curatorial work as a “poetic reassembly.” Throughout your career, what’s a surprising discovery you’ve made at the meeting of unique entities or ideas?

I've done some independent curating, and for the past ten years I’ve also run the Suffolk University Gallery.

Similar to the process for my own art or Catalyst, I’ll have an idea that needs to be expressed in some way. For example, I did a show last summer called Reading the Earth, for which I did lots of research and read Simon Schama. I also invited five painters for whom their subject is more than a landscape, it's a deep connection to the earth. What happened in the gallery came as a surprise—when the five artists came together, they began rhyming back and forth, conversing with the work. I can’t control these outcomes, but I can make the conditions for them.

You’re making space—an idea I think about sometimes with our work, too. When people ask me what we do at the Napkin, the best answer I have, and the one that feels most fulfilling, is that we make space for other creators and thinkers to come together.

Picking up on that idea of making space, which I like a lot, I often think that what I'm doing, which sounds like what you're doing too, is an act of generosity. Artists, musicians, writers have a gift and that gift is to be given, not to be held onto.

I also appreciate our audiences, the people who come to experience the conversations. It's really an opportunity for people to connect—it opens space for them, too.