A Pilgrim in Art and Science (Natalie Settles)

This week, Natalie Settles invites us on her pilgrimage through art and science and shares many insights along the way. Natalie is an award-winning artist and scientist whose work recasts the interdisciplinary relationship between evolutionary biology and Victorian design. Her ability to move between disciplines and make art in limited spaces has given Natalie a unique lens on the creative process, the health crisis, and transitions of all kinds. So pack your headphones, bring along your curiosity, and join us on this inspiring journey.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Limit Does Not Exist is a production of I
Heart Radiom. Hey, I'm Christina Wallace and I'm Kate Scott
Campbell and you're listening to the Limit does Not Exist,
a podcast for human then Diagrams, coming at you every

(00:21):
single week and hosted by us. Have you been feeling
pangs of wander less lately? Well, today we're going to
take you on a pilgrimage. That's right. Our guest is
Natalie Settles, an award winning artist and scientist who thinks
of her twenty year path through these two fields as

(00:42):
a pilgrimage, complete with wrong turns, pivotal moments, and ongoing discovery.
This journey has led Natalie to a current focus on
the relationship between evolutionary biology and Victorian design, which makes
my period peace loving heart go boom. And she was
all so an artist in residence at an evolutionary genetics

(01:03):
lab at the University of Pittsburgh, which is quite literally
one of the coolest jobs I've ever heard of. Natalie's
ability to move between disciplines and create art in limited
spaces has given her a unique lens on navigating the
current health crisis and difficult transitions in general. We think
you're going to find a lot of inspiration and even

(01:23):
hope in our conversation. So I'm ready to set out
on this pilgrimage, are you k Yes, let's do it.
Can we start with a quick introduction? How do you
introduce yourself? Gosh, it's relatively context specific. Sometimes I'll say

(01:45):
I'm an artist. Sometimes I'll say an artist in scientists.
Sometimes I'll say I'm working on a large scale, digitally
evolving work that evolves in response to its viewers, if
it's like a project thing. I love that point about context,
because being able read context is one of those skills
that comes with being an artist, a creative person. I

(02:07):
love that you put that first. It's a testament to
you well. And also, I mean, this is what I
love about seeing other people who may not share the
same fields in common, but like me, you know, we
all have to speak to different audiences. I Mean, the
biggest trick I learned from watching people move between fields
is I would cringe when I would be sitting with
my science colleagues being spoken to by someone from literature

(02:30):
who's getting really hopped up about things that are really
obvious to the scientists. But it's exciting to them. It's
the same stuff that's often exciting to me, but it's
not revolutionary or exciting to the person in the field,
for whom this is just kind of forgiven. And then
the things that someone in the arts would take for
granted are often complete news to someone in the sciences,

(02:52):
you know. But then I move into science and then
I have to play under those rules, and for me,
it's then taking those and sort of fitting them together
and getting that kind of sweet spot of the shape
between them, you know, where you end up putting them together. Oh,
I love that sidebar. If you're seated next to someone
on like an airplane, so you have no context for this, okay, okay,
and they start talking to you, okay, and they say, like,

(03:15):
what do you do? How much do you share with them?
Like do you try to downplay your interestingness if you're
trying to shut down the conversation, sometimes it will have
a lot to do. So I'm I'm pretty introverted, I'm
very outgoing, But so you don't talk to people, no,
actually I do. I Mean the weird thing was, I
have very extroverted moms, So I think my sort of

(03:37):
presentation of myself two comes Acrost is pretty outgoing. Same. Yeah,
So I actually do talk to people in airplanes, probably
probably about half the time. I mean, I oftentimes I'm
picking up on their level of energy and how much
they may want to engage. That said, if someone wants
to engage, it's not the determining factor for me. Sometimes
I'm like, really, i'd like to read my book now.

(03:58):
It will have a lot to do with you. If
I'm going out for business versus coming back from business,
you know, coming back, I'm definitely going to be kind
of like letting things settle and letting pieces fall into place.
Not you know, massive world domination thoughts just yet, but
usually just kind of letting the pieces sort of sift down.
So I'm so struck by the amount of calibration. I

(04:18):
think we do it so much without even realizing it.
But listening to you articulate that process so beautifully, it's
giving me a new appreciation of how much we're constantly
calibrating when we are interacting with people and talking about
what we do and our work. So, Natalie, on that note,
your work has been described as recasting. I love this.

(04:42):
The interdisciplinary relationship between Victorian design and evolutionary biology into
contemporary practice. So a million things fire in my brain
when I read that out loud. We are so here
for this, How do you land on this particular intersection
of Victorian design and evolutionary biology. It was an interesting

(05:06):
thing to come across. I had already been an artist
who had been embedded in science for probably about ten
years by the time I discovered that evolutionary biology and
Victorian design were young fields together, and they actually had
an existing dialogue. There were people who worked in both
these fields who understood them intimately and informed one another.

(05:28):
For example, at the time, you would say Victorian design
in Britain and you'd say um Art nouveau on the continent.
Sometimes have to stop and think because in German it's
Union's deal. So and the reason why that's important is
there's a German scientist who is exposed to the catalogs
of these designers, and he's a zoologist. And by this time,

(05:49):
you know, we're thinking in evolutionary terms. It's really early days,
but you know, Linnaeus has already been out there during
his little trees and saying, you know, who's who's related
to whom? We don't really have a genetic sense of that.
So it's still a little bit imprecise. And Ernst Heckel,
the German scientist and zoologists, needs to find a compelling
way to show people this sort of related nous among

(06:10):
varied forms, that is evolution in action, or at least
the results of evolution. And so he sees these designers
whereas where every time you filip a page, there's like,
you know, a variation on a Sussex reed chair, there's
a variation on a broach, of variation on a vase,
a variation on motifs in a wallpaper. And he's looking
at this saying, this is variation on a theme. This
is what evolution does, you know? It creates these lines

(06:32):
of variation on a theme. And so he creates a
book called Kunstformandatur and it's a book that looks for
all the world like a designer's catalog, but it's full
of biological forms. So you've got jellyfish and you've got fish,
and you've got rhodifers, and it's just nuts. I mean,
it took off, I am I am told without knowing

(06:55):
exactly that at least at some point in history, and
Germany it was just really common for most families to
have this on their shelves. I need this on my
shelf well better than that in isolation when we probably
shouldn't be, you know, ordering extraneous things. The entire catalog
is I may be misspeaking. I should check on this.
The most famous design catalog called the Grammar of Ornament

(07:17):
by Owen Jones, which is the parallel to this one.
But in design is online, and I believe also constform
and dearnture in its entirety is online. Okay, we're gonna
have to see if we can find a link to that.
I can't really spell whatever that German word is. That's fine.
It just means art forms in nature. And if you
did art forms in nature, you can get there. But
I can look for it for you. So if you
hold these two like together, um, you essentially see the

(07:40):
parallel of these two worlds. And then the crazy part is,
so Hackel does this. It is really compelling. It's exactly
what Hackel wanted. He wanted to make a compelling visual
argument for evolution. And then Renee Bigner in France sees
this work among other you know, many people have seen
it by now, Bene sees this, and he sees the
road of first or the ameboid protozoa we'd call them now,

(08:02):
and there are these little underwater sea creatures that have
an internal skeleton. And he bases the entrance to the
Paris World's Fair. He was an architect. He bases the
structure of it on a roadifer And so if you
go to look for the n Paris World's Fair entrance,
it's based on a road. For that is stunning. So
how did you fall into this intersection? Because this is fascinating,

(08:27):
but I'm pretty sure the story of how you got
there is probably equally fascinating. Okay, So well, growing up,
I was already interested in art and in science. Um
it was kind of went all the way back, and
when I got to undergraduate, I went into art mainly
because I felt like so many of the disciplines I
was interested in I could still engage them from art.
It's really cool that you knew that at that age

(08:50):
that art was this kind of open door that you
could go into other disciplines from I don't know that
I would have known that at that well. I grew
up among artists, and I was a little weird. I wasn't.
I was a little bit more omnivorous than them. Um,
and they knew that, but they pointed that out to me,
I think, and that was helpful, right, And my mom

(09:11):
called me the dreamer. I was always just sort of
like in my head, thinking about everything, reading about everything,
taking it all in, and art was really my way
to mess around with that, to sort of make sense
of it. And so when I got into undergraduate, I
sort of flipped around through major's really fast and then
landed on art. And it was funny. My parents said,
we wondered when you'd figure that out, and they're letting

(09:32):
you have the experience of figuring it out. Right. Yeah, Well,
I think they just knew I would get there. I
think they really trusted my process. I think they'd watched
it long enough. Um. They were funny as parents. I
think a lot of people get pushed mine respectators, but
they sort of enjoyed watching the game. I really met
my sister and I had had free reign in the
directions we went so anyway, and undergraduate I went into
art um but I took I've very nearly had a

(09:55):
minor and so many other things. So there were just
so many other things I was involved in. I was
just shy of a miner and a lot of them.
But I took the things that were really I felt
they were great fodder for what I was doing. It
wasn't so much about having the minor as it was
about having the knowledge, the experience, the conversations. And so
then when I went to pick graduate school, I applied

(10:16):
to a bunch and I had a choice between a
top art school and a school where it had the
top program from my field at the time, which was printmaking,
but it was based in this giant powerhouse of a
science school. I mean, it's to this day among scientists
when I say where I went to graduate school, it's
like the hats off the little bow. You know, they
know where I'm from, and this is the University of

(10:36):
Wisconsin Madison. Yeah. So there, I mean, you were among
like fifty two libraries on as many and more subjects.
You know, there were experts in so many fields. The
moment I stepped out of that art department, I was
immediately in the world of science, which is strange to say,
but you'd walked down the street and that was the
ambient conversation you'd go into the libraries, you'd go out
down the street, you go into the restaurants, you sit

(10:58):
out and have a drink. That's what people were talking about.
So I have to say, in the beginning, for as
interdisciplinaries I was that was a little bit of a
culture shock because the premise of how they thought and
what they did was so different from my field in
so many ways. I mean, for as pie'd as we
like to get about, oh my gosh, we're you know,
art and science. If you really dive into these cultures,

(11:18):
they're really quite different. Um. So that's the backstory that
i'd been in that for and slowly, in being in that,
I started to be able to detect conceptual and motivational
similarities between artistic and scientific practices. So even if on
the surface you look really different, you had an underlying
similarity in your motivation or your conceptual way of moving

(11:40):
through the world. And then coming from that into a
time when I was living in Cambridge, England and visiting
London pretty frequently, that was where I was introduced to
this relationship. And I wouldn't I don't think I would
have seen it had I not already been immersed in
contemporary science and then seemingly accidentally tripped across this relationship.
But you you you notice the things you're primed to

(12:02):
see in a certain sense. You know, I was already
paying attention and seeing and looking for and understanding this relationship.
So it was again just being in a place where,
on a level of probability, it was more likely to
trip across it. So and then from there, knowing how
integritly related those two fields had been, now going back

(12:23):
and thinking, oh my gosh, how does this reframe how
I can interact between contemporary and contemporary science, not just
you know, quoting and having this sort of lovely historical story.
But what's the next step? What can we do now
that we couldn't do then? How can I think about
it now? What's the next best question to ask? I
think that's so interesting when you are diving into this

(12:44):
relationship that has history behind it and figuring out like
how much of that are you influenced by? And how
much of your own thinking do you want to do
kind of without that historical context, right, because I'm not
interested in just rehashing and telling an old story. But
insofar as in art, in science, in any cultural endeavor,

(13:06):
you can be informed by what people have done before you.
I mean, I think in the science is one of
the things that they have a really strong sensibility for
is um that your work should be outmoded relatively quickly.
You know that you will be built upon, just as
you're building upon those before you. So there's this sense
of I mean, I think everybody probably wants to be
remembered to some extent, but in another sense, if what

(13:28):
you've done is truly helpful and useful, it will be
built upon and you will pass from memory in a
certain sense. And I think a lot of them are.
I hope I'm not overstating it, but I think they
accept that to some extent, and I love that about it.
It helps me to think in terms of how do
you move the dialogue on? You know, what does that
mean for me in my own practice, and what can
I due to build on to rediscover the stories of

(13:51):
the past in a way that can help move the conversation,
move move practice. Now, you've spent four years as an

(14:15):
artist in residence in a biology lab at the University
of Pittsburgh. This is the first time I think we've
ever heard of an artist in residence at an academic
scientific lab. How did that come about and what did
your work with them look like. That's a really good question.
So coming out of my ten years at Madison, so

(14:35):
I had three years in graduate school and then I
stayed on for some time, and then I spent stints
in Washington, d C. In England. The next move that
happened was coming out to Pittsburgh, and the shock to
the system retrospectively was Madison was a place where the
moment you left your front door, you were in the
world of science, or at least to me, somehow that

(14:56):
became the reality everyone you crossed paths with. In Ssburg
that was not the same. You know, it's not a
university town. I mean, it has universities and it, but
it sort of transcends that. And usually at transition moments,
one of my favorite things to do is to just
take stock and look at where I've been and what
I know. And if I'm doing this at every transitional point,

(15:18):
then I kind of know the distance I've come since
the last time that I asked this question. And then
my and I've already kind of said this before, but
my next practice, after I've sort of assessed all that
is to say, given what I know now, what's the
next best question I can ask? And what do I
need to do? Because usually it's not just asking a
question conceptually, it's saying, conceptually, this is how I'd like

(15:39):
to understand it, or or here's the question I have.
But then what's the practice that kind of pushes that forward? Natalie?
I love that. I love that given what I know now,
that sort of accounts for the foundation of your experience.
And then I love that you start with the question
before the what do I do? I love that trio
of a smith. That's really cool. It's a lot of

(16:02):
fun too. It gives you great appreciation for a lot
of your own experience, and that can be the stuff
that went well and the stuff that didn't go well,
because both are really informative. I mean, you don't just
want to replay your greatest hits, which would be just
as bad as falling into the same hole again. So yes,
it doesn't mean you won't replay or fall into a

(16:22):
whole time, but you know you've done it absolutely. It's
a familiar whole. I've been to this whole. I recall this,
I remember how I got out. I think though, I
do like what artist Rachel White Reid said once. She
said something like she's doing her Turbine Hall exhibition, I
think this is an art twenty one and she said

(16:43):
something like, um, I realized that the problems don't change,
they just get bigger. So I wonder sometimes if the
hole just gets bigger. So if he got out of
the certain way the last time, you know, not your
hole is bigger. But um So the answer to how
did I get into the lab or how did that
come to be? Was I realized I had a lot

(17:04):
of casual interaction with people in the sciences. In fact,
first probably the three years before I left Madison, I
really started realizing. I mean, when you say science is
it's so broad. It's like saying arts. You know, you
can't have that kind of a broad relationship. You really
have to be asking something much more pointed. And I've
been tossing that around and you know, talking with people

(17:25):
and just I think, you know, in my own I
do a lot of writing just to think through things.
I do a lot of sketching. There's just a lot
of places in my practice that catch stuff, you know,
And now I was having to look at how do
you make a much more intentional interaction? And one of
the tricks I had learned. It makes it sound trivial,
it wasn't was learning to make these connections between a
scientific practice and an arts practice, and say I could

(17:48):
start to note, you know, like this scientist and this artist.
I'd even done those with people I knew. I said,
by the way, I think your work is like that
person's work, and then I'd introduced them and it was
like this discovering if what I saw was substantial, and
there were some really amazing connections that happened. So I
was like, Okay, you're already naturally doing that, So it
sounded like it made sense for you to then do

(18:09):
it to yourself. Getting the lab, it made sense to
go and find my analog, you know, the practice that
matched mine, And I mean, you get this kind of
finite number of resources to look through. And when I
moved to Pittsburgh, one of the most curious things I
observed in myself was that I engaged the art scene.
You know, I started showing up shows, going different things,

(18:29):
But just as quickly I started cruising the lab websites
and going to biology department talks and getting the lay
of the field day, like what are their strengths, who's
out here, what are they doing? And I came to
this point where I was like, this is an interesting
artifact in my history. I either have to act on
it in a new way or have to chuck it.
And I decided that that would mean finding something that

(18:52):
was a close analog to my own practice, and so I,
by about a year and a half in I knew
which one that was. And I met the person for coffee,
said hey, I like your work, and we had a
really interesting, like hour and a half conversation, and the
person said, well, how do we proceed? And I said,
I'd like to be an artist in residence your lab.
You know. I stepped out the door after that thought,
my gosh, what have I just done? But that was

(19:16):
that was the start of it, and the agreement from
the beginning was first an exploratory year, because one thing
I had learned is you can think you've found a connection,
and I don't just mean like chemistry or something, but
like also just this sort of parallel that I was
looking for. It seemed there, but I wanted to give
credit that I couldn't understand it fully from the outside.
So a year an exploratory year where we just carried

(19:36):
on what we were doing, but put our practices in
close contact. So I moved mind to the lab because
it was the easiest one to move. And then after
that the question of you know what concrete byproduct might
come from that. And the first year was based on
the work of Joseph Boys, who originated the notion of
social sculpture. So it's a form of sculpture that's a

(19:57):
material and it's you take two social practices, put them
in close contact, and in doing so you will likely,
as in the natural world, in putting you know, two
populations in contact of different or even the same species,
push the trajectory of those practices, those organisms. And considering
I had approached an evolutionary biologist, I also thought this

(20:19):
gave that person, you know, traction in my world, saying
here's something that's really kind of a half and half,
you know, something that was derived from scientific practice and
informs an immaterial form of art practice. You're releasing an
online narrative this year in weekly installments called a Pilgrim
in Art and Science, which, listening to you talking with you,

(20:41):
sounds like the perfect title for something that you would create.
So can you tell us more about what inspired you
to create this narrative and sort of what a few
of the different pieces of it are. Yeah, this piece
actually has some fairly old roots. I was challenged in
graduate school to my advisor said, you know, I think

(21:01):
a lot of people would look at your work and
you're thinking, and think of you as fairly scatter shot.
And he said, actually, the reverse of that is really
quite true. He said, you follow a thread really doggedly,
and it doesn't matter what terrain it covers. So the
internal consistency is the thread. And yeah, it was such

(21:23):
a gift, it really was. I mean it's a gift
when people I remember a lot of things people say,
and not all of them seem useful, but some of
them kind of you just live with them and you
kind of you test it out in your own experience
and so we have to chuck and some of them
are still with me. And that was gosh, now, like
twenty years ago. Um, so he said that, and I
wrote a piece and um it was a hard one

(21:46):
piece of prose. There were some late nights and it
just wasn't that good. I don't think I had the perspective.
Yet I think one of the by products, maybe you
know other folks in the in your podcast community will
recognize this, But if you work among a lot of fields,
across a lot of disciplines, sometimes marshaling a straight line

(22:08):
through them is the hardest thing to do, I mean,
and it's really only something you see in hindsight. You
can't often premeditate it, you know. So I think I
was a little too close. I was probably a little
too young, but it gave me a job that I
really never let go of until writing Pilgrim, and I
think will probably remain a part of my practice, which
was to try to do that. And then this is

(22:28):
so amazing. And I saw a scientist, one of my
one of the most inspiring folks I know in my field,
and he gave a talk he is I'm gonna say
he's like me. That's claiming a lot. I'm going to say,
I'm like him. Really is more like it. He's further
down the road. And what I recognized in his talk was,
here's a person who will follow a thread over any terrain.

(22:49):
Because other folks and you know, around me, other colleagues
in the sciences had said, oh, yeah, you can't follow
what he's saying, and I realized it's because he's jumping
fields and he's perfect clear, legible, but he's just willing
to go where the question goes, and he disregards discipline boundaries.
And I saw him do this, and he's speaking to

(23:10):
a mixed audience. I mean, I'm there. It's a philosophy audience,
is a science audience. I can't even say how many
other types of people might have been in it. And
as he's speaking, he knows a certain number of them personally,
and so he'll turn to them and he'd be like, well,
that would be this, and he would translate it really
into their fields language or understand how you would say
that colloquially, not even jargon, but just you know, it

(23:31):
has the flavor of the context of the literature you
may have read, the people you would consider credible that
sort of thing, and also some of the ideas that
interplace with and so he turned to say, and that
would be so and so, that would be such in
the sense of so and so, but of course that
extrapolates on whatever over here. So he's just kind of
gesturing two different people in the audience and doing this

(23:51):
work of translation. He's code switching, and I was thinking
he's doing it. I mean, he's writing what I was
supposed to have written right in front of me. And
he's he's near end of career, and he wrote an
amazing book um that I've really loved that. Basically, he
maps where he's been in his field and he shows
all the He sets a little signposts at all the places.

(24:13):
He said and I took this fork, but I didn't
take that when someone else should do that, because that's
really interesting and I just didn't have time. And so
he's leaving all these signposts. He's writing this book, mapping
all the train he couldn't have covered and really wanted to,
and all the things he knows are imperfect solutions to
things that he couldn't better examine at the time because
of technology, money, focus, whatever. And I'm watching this and

(24:36):
I'm like, oh my gosh, I now know how to
do this. I feel like he's leading the trail of
candy and you're picking it up. Yeah, And I'm like,
oh my god. Yes. And so I get home and
I have a talk. It happened that I had a
talk coming up in a few months and I thought, well, gosh,
this is the moment to do it. Because the talk
was going to be at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History,

(24:57):
which is adjoint to the Carnegie Museum of Art, and
I knew it was going to be a st audience,
and I thought, Oh, this is the moment I get
to try it out. You know, because the talker writing
is only as good as the people it will connect
to if you're talking across multiple fields. And so I
wrote it and it was called a Pilgrim and Art
in Science, and I had people who have known me
for years come up to me and say, I get it.

(25:17):
I get it now, and I was so satisfying so
many levels. Oh my goodness. So, so in the project now,
which you're continuing to, for lack of a better word,
roll out, how do you kind of approach each part
of it? What does each part of it look like
that you're you're sharing? Right, So I'm rolling it out actively,

(25:38):
although it took me two years to write it, so
it's actually complete. Oh amazing. Yeah, So it took me
two years to write it. It's a non trivial thing
to make sure you can communicate across all these fields
and make sure that you're really hitting your marks absolutely.
It also was it's a tough story in a lot
of ways, so I really had to figure out how
to tell certain parts of it and do it justice.

(25:59):
So let's Pilgrim and art and science. So there's the art, art, science,
and Pilgrim is this kind of ineffable quality, and it's
the story is interwoven with a journey that I took
also in on the Comuno to Santiago, which is an
ancient pilgrimage trail that in its recent most thousand years,
it's been a Catholic right, but before that it was

(26:21):
a Celtic right, so it's been a long trod path.
And um, I went on it because my husband Bird
had been really interested in it. But it ended up
that my experience on it was really quite unexpectedly profound,
and it just it became a very interesting sort of
spine on which to affix this whole story. And uh

(26:43):
so the pieces of Pilgrim are some of what we've
already talked about a little bit of my formal history
in art, my formal history and science. And then the
semi ineffable quality because in a way with art and science.
It's not really about the disciplines for me. I think
a lot of times when people engage me over my work,
they think, oh, you know, it's some elucidating science, or

(27:05):
it's policing you know, you know, as an artist being
the conscience of the culture, or that really they're they're
just the same thing. It's that's sort of usually the
gut reaction to me saying that I work in ordan sciences.
That they're like, oh yeah, really, at their heart did
the same thing. And I was like, that's so much
easier to say on the outside, absolutely as opposed to

(27:26):
breaking down those nuanced differences of the two well, really
having to navigate them honestly, like on the ground, the
realities of having to navigate them get really thorny pretty quick.
And also, you know, give you probably. I mean, the
thing I haven't said really is that it's not really
about the fields. For me, it's about this kind of
larger conception, like this larger engagement with reality that anyone

(27:48):
field can't really wholly grasp. The virtue of having one
to three practices reaching out to touch a bit of
reality is that you get this kind of inferred greater
sense of what's out there. I love that you recently

(28:17):
sent this amazing newsletter, and it was one of the
reasons why we said, Okay, it's time to reach out
and have her on the show. You said, something I've
discovered over the years is that my biggest and grandest
work tends to come from my smallest studios, and it
was in regards to the health crisis, where we're all

(28:38):
suddenly sequestered by ourselves or in close proximity to just
a few other people. Can you share an example of
what you mean by that and why you think that is? Yeah,
it's funny. I've thought about this a long time and
it was only with the health crisis that, you know,
it had this kind of expanded meaning for me, you know,

(28:59):
because I hope this for all of us, and I
also just wanted people to find a bit of hope
in their shrinking lives. And I think that it's been
sometimes hard to really get at. So, yeah, there's a
few examples of this, I mean, really the engagement with
Victorian design and evolutionary biology. My studio at that point
was a kitchen table i'd shoved into a living room
in a flat in Cambridge, England, and that was the

(29:20):
work that earned you know, some of the larger grants
in the beginning of my career, and it was a
funny moment to live in a really small and focused space.
I mean, there's so many works I could point to,
because my studios have changed as I've moved, and probably
the three smallest have been the three most productive. And
I think part of it is, I mean I think

(29:41):
to what I was doing at the time, and it
was typically asking me to say what's important? What is
important in your life because you had limited money, or
you had limited time, or you had limited focus, and
so you had to really choose. And I feel like
being forced into those choices, you know, like I grew
up in the era of film cameras where you couldn't
take unlimited photos, and it's like the sort of sensibility

(30:04):
you had to cultivate to use that film. Well, I think,
you know, forced you into making really good choices. And
I feel like in my studios, yeah, when they're small,
I mean it also forces me to it. I think
one of my other favorite practices that I I don't
think I learned it from the movie director Peter Jackson,
but he kind of encapsulated it really well. So in

(30:25):
the appendices to The Lord of the Rings he talks
about how he does there are five stages to getting
a scene into the movie, and the first one is
the cheapest and the fastest, and the second one slightly
more expensive and slightly more complex, in the next one,
and the next one, and the next one until you
finally you're at the movie. But the first one is
a drawing, and for me, that captures so much of

(30:47):
my own practice and my own thinking, whether it's scientific
artistic that you start with what's the quickest, cheapest, smallest
thing I can do, to ask myself if this is
something that needs to move forward, and you just keep
iterating and by the time you know you really want
to throw your chips in on this one, or that's
not the right for I think that means giving up.
But you really want to throw your steak in on

(31:08):
this that, I mean, you're pretty sure, and so you'll
really go to the links that you need to to
make it happen, you know, whether it's working with a
fabricator that can work at larger scale or reaching out
to a lab, talking to someone in the field who's
you know, thought about x, Y or Z, you know,
putting some money and on the technology that will help
you get to the next place, whatever it is. And

(31:31):
so I think by that point you also know what
you need, so you're not sort of flinging resources around.
So in the small studio sense, you know, it starts
probably with a drawing, and then it starts with a
scale model, which comes from my history and model making,
and then builds from there until finally when you're making
the big thing. Like probably the most recent instance of
this was a large scale glass work. It was happening

(31:53):
at the fabricator, so I didn't have to be building
it in my ten by twenty studios. I just love
the stages of kind of becoming more concrete or the
iteration of that. I think certainly in the tech world
we have the minimum viable right, and then you kind
of keep building on it from there. But it breaks
down this I think often kind of the psychic barrier

(32:16):
of I have an idea and then it's sort of like, yes,
but where's my block of marble and my chisels to
make the David? You know, you're like there are things
between the idea and the block of marble. They can
kind of lower the stakes and let you experiment and
test am I on the right path before I need
to get all in and buy the black marble? Yeah,

(32:37):
and I'm I'd have to say, you know, a lot
of people talk to me over the years and they'd
say things like, gosh, you know, whenever I do something,
it never turns out like it is in my head.
And I said, oh, I never wanted to, like, because
the one in my head gets improved with every stage
of doing something. I mean, the moment you've done something
sort of like you know, the Pilgrim and art in science,
it was started with that hard one piece of pros

(32:59):
back in grad school, has continued with every bit of
writing I've ever done, in all the talks I've given.
And then when I see someone do an example that,
You're like, ah, that's so much closer what I was
shooting for, but I'm going to translate it. I'm going
to show what that would look like in my own experience.
And then you know, you take the next give the talk,
and then you realize when you write the talk down
because people ask you to that it doesn't work the
same and you have to rewrite it completely. I love

(33:21):
the light that that shines to on the absolute importance
of process over thinking about product, like just starting and
being in process. You shared a really compelling article with
us by the fantasy author Brandon Sanderson and which he
describes a concept repeated in fantastical fiction, which is it

(33:42):
isn't what the heroes can do that is most important
to who they are, but what they have trouble doing,
and that limits are more compelling than superpowers. And it
reminds me of there's a professor at Art Center, Gael Wolf,
who has written about this. He talks about friction as
being integral to creativity, that creativity can't really exist without friction.

(34:06):
So now, like, can you talk about how comprise damaged
are limited spaces, as you've described to us, can be
interesting to work in a Yeah. Absolutely, I've really come
to a place where I almost prefer something that that
sort of lacks a kind of ideal character to it.
A really good concrete example of this is a work
called marginal Um. It was in a gallery that was

(34:28):
really not advantageous to hanging art because the long stretches
of white space were broken up by doors and slandage
and fire extinguishers and outlets and fire alarms and all
sorts of things kind of a nightmare. And then I
had this big oculus like trench light down the center
that when you flipped it on, immediately drew all attention
away from the walls. But when a curator I knew
approached me about this space, I thought, oh, my gosh,

(34:49):
this is perfect because where I was at I was
thinking about spaces that were compromised. I was thinking about
I mean, even my subject matter at the time, which
was a rabbit up cystaliana. It's the first plant to
ever have its genome sequenced, and it grows in hedgerows.
It grows in compromise spaces. It doesn't compete. It's not
a food crop. It's really it's lifespan and its size

(35:10):
were what recommended it and its genome size. So it
was really thinking about compromised spaces, and so I ended
up claiming all of these compromises in the space. They
became the focus. This is the first time in that
gallery that the big stretches of white were not the focus.
The lights were not aimed at them, the work was
not hanging on them. And I even drew onto the
ceiling and embraced that trough light that was really distracting,

(35:33):
and so this is the first time we've ever been
able to leave it on during an exhibition. And even
at one point when she was helping me out with
a couple of things, she just she kind of teared
up and she said, this is the first time I've
ever loved this space. And I feel like, you know,
I think to one of my favorite writers, Annie Dillard,
who says that, you know, she wrote Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,

(35:53):
Holly the firm Um the writing life, and she basically said,
you know, you're not complete without the damage of the
life gives you. You know, no creature is I'm paraphrasing,
but you know it's sort of damaged. This is the
default position, and thinking of it is unfortunate, and not
thinking of it as a sort of part and parcel
of the patina of life lived, you know, misses out.

(36:14):
So yeah, usually with my works, conceptually, I like to
back myself into corners. You know, I don't have to
be a person working in art and science. A lot
of people have said, I don't understand why you don't
just get on with making drawings, and why do you
bother with all this, and you know it's some really
scientists are likely you're making it really hard when you
engage you know, science, but also have to sort of
bring in the contingencies of art. And in both cases

(36:38):
it's because I really like hemming in that very tight
space and say okay, now solve this, Okay, now solve this. Okay,
now solve this, and you know, having to play by
this really weird set of rules. And part of it is,
I know, if it can play by those really weird
set of rules, it speaks into two different spaces, and
the either overlap or dissonance of that is really I mean,

(36:58):
that's what I kind of lived for. So I love it.
The patina of life live a great phrase that's so inspiring,
particularly right now. It really is, and it makes me wonder.
You know this is we're all experiencing this in real time,
and so I want to ask you, and I understand
that this might be like something that you're in process with,

(37:21):
but how is sort of this particular moment in time,
this health crisis, how is it affecting your current work
or your current thinking about what you've been working on.
Have you been finding that you need to you've been
sort of stopping work on some things, being interested in
other things, or you kind of continuing to go down

(37:43):
that path that you're current, Well, if I can do
a quick reverse. I think the first point of contact
I had thinking about this time was January, but definitely February.
It was the first time I think my two fields
have really been as far apart as I've ever seen them.
So I was seeing my colleagues in evolutionary biology just

(38:04):
sort of losing their marbles. And these are people who
are not prone to fits of high emotion typically, I mean,
like at least in their professional lives, um, you know,
in January and February, just really losing their minds over
what was going to be happening without anybody really getting
a grip. And and it was weird because I mean,
at the same time, I'm watching my colleagues in the
sciences that you know, art fairs and large events and going,

(38:26):
oh my gosh, you know, like everyone in evolutionary biology
was thinking in terms of, Okay, I need to set
aside a couple of weeks worth of food so that
if I get sick, I can back away from my
lab and things can continue but I can take my
quarantine and nobody has to intervene. This is the time
when nobody's really thinking in those terms, at least in
the broader culture. And they're all putting out as much

(38:47):
information as possible to each other, and they're all writing
at protocols for like how to address this not just
for themselves but for broader approach, and they're all, you know,
chewing over the data that's just coming out and um
doing some of the are quite frankly, Um, you know,
these are the folks who are doing the genome analysis
that says the strain came from Washington, the stream came
from China, this strain came from Europe, and um, yeah.

(39:09):
So the reality of that was it was weird to
feel my world's be so out of sink and to
be writing to focus in the arts and saying like
trying to collate what I could from my colleagues in
the sciences and saying, here's the situation, and here's what
we need to be thinking in terms, and trying to
introduce them to something that had been digested for you know,

(39:33):
three weeks and more ahead of time in the other field,
and bracing them for what was coming down the pike,
and many of them really just kind of not getting
the magnitude of it, and hard because I'm the only
one they're hearing it from. Um. But it was the
moment that being interdisciplinary really brought home to me the
sort of responsibility you carry in your fields, and when

(39:56):
you move between them, the responsibility whole from one to
the next. In the sense of communicating, you know, when
one is seeing something the other isn't. It's almost like
being a prophet or something. Yeah, is it the first
time you've ever been called a profit? That maybe I
like this profit walk into a bar to figure out

(40:17):
the third Yeah, and there is you know. And also
then yeah, it's funny. There's just been so much the process.
I think that was really the first point as far
as you know, concrete effects. Of course, yeah, it's delayed things. Um,
it's changed the nature of things suddenly. Though of course
people are more interested in the digital aspects of my
work too, although some of those things are physically based,

(40:37):
so those have been pushed out. So I'd say one
of the things. I mean, there's definitely a lot of
unfortunate aspects to that, but there is a part of
me too, that really just likes a bit of time
to lose myself in something. And I've found that while
it has come by unfortunate means, I think the opportunity
to just take stock. I think one of the things

(40:57):
that's been rolling down around in my head a lot
is the difference between what's important and what's urgent. And
I think this sort of frothy panic of information is
right front and center, but when you really step back,
I mean I learned this from a friend who works
in nonprofit construction for mixed income and he said, at
certain moments, I have to ask myself, is what I
was doing yesterday still valuable and still important? And if

(41:20):
those are both true, then that's what I do today.
And so he was the first one who really showed
me in recent memory. I've had this lesson from others,
but when something kind of throws everything to the fan,
how do you make the choices then? And so I've
really been sifting through the difference between what's urgent and
what's important and doing my best to you know, write

(41:44):
to my legislators, to reach out to my neighbors, to
put money to causes that are helping to support those
in need. And those on the front lines, because you know,
we do find ourselves. Even though my work has been
pushed back, my spouse's work is still fairly solid. So
we're trying to, you know, react responsibly. But then after
that and after you've done as much as you can,

(42:05):
I mean, you're not doing anyone else any good sort
of sweating bullets, and now it's sort of get down
to business and ask, Okay, what's the important stuff that
still needs to move forward. It's very encouraging to hear
you talking about processing and also being able to see
the very different kinds of processing in these fields that
you're in and find your own way as you have

(42:25):
done so beautifully and continue to do in your work. Kate,
that was truly one of the most fascinating conversations we've had. Yes,
I think I learned more in that episode than in
like an entire class same. I had no idea of

(42:45):
the connection between evolutionary biology and Victorian design, although of
course it makes sense when you realize they developed in
tandem in nineteenth century England. Suddenly the idea of an
artist in residence in a biology lab makes complete sense, right.
I love finding these connections. It's One of the things
I love about our show that we get to keep

(43:08):
discovering stories throughout history where the arts and sciences and
other disciplines intersected and informed each other. You know, Christina,
we know that this is not a new thing. That
there were human ven diagrams all the way back to
Renaissance Italy and classical Greece, and honestly probably even before

(43:28):
that when cave people were doing their thing. It makes
me really want to do an episode on human ven
diagrams in history. Oh my god, that would be But yes,
that's exactly right. This way of thinking and working and
creating is as old as civilization itself, and we do
ourselves no favors by insisting on silos for these different specializations.

(43:52):
It's absolutely right, and it's so exciting to see Natalie
on her own path of discovery. You know. One of
the aspects of Natalie's story that I loved so much
and it feels really actionable for our listeners, is how
she's developed this ability of translation, and I would add
to that the thoughtful awareness of its value when interacting

(44:18):
between disciplines. I love that when we first asked Natalie
what she does, she said, well, it depends on whom
I'm speaking with. And I loved how she talked about
getting her m f A and Madison, Wisconsin and how
she was studying art while being surrounded by scientists, and
that that really enabled her to uncover the connections between

(44:41):
her work and the sciences and in tandem to develop
the vocabulary to talk about that intersection. So much this
because the assumptions and the paradigms, the vocabulary, the ways
that we see the world, they're so different depending on
who we are surrounded by, right, And the scientists saw

(45:01):
the world so different than how she did through her
artistic training. But by working among them and colliding with
their thinking, she developed I think she called it the
ability to detect the fundamental connections between seemingly disparate fields. Right.
So by seeking out a community different from yours and

(45:23):
building connections as you create your work within it, you
can develop quite a distinct take on your field. Absolutely,
And not to sound like a broken record, by the way,
we're their records in Victorian times, but there I don't
know it's covered all right, that's a to google later.
Not to sound like a broken record. But Natalie's inclination

(45:47):
to detect these connections is a skill in and of itself,
her sensitivity to that, her interest in it. Often I
think we just don't realize that the fact that we're
even drawn to something is a personality trait of our
own that's valuable. And the other thing that Natalie talked
about being drawn to Christina, which I found so fascinating,

(46:09):
are these limits of spaces. I loved when she talked
about her work called Marginal, which is in that gallery,
and that it was the first time that gallery had
work that exposed kind of all of the quote unquote
problems of the gallery, that whole line of creativity of
almost as Natalie said, preferring compromise spaces just gives I

(46:32):
know me so much hope during this time of these
major transitions, these major limits, constraints isolation to really accept
both the challenge of that and the potential opportunity. Well,
it just reminds me so much of episode seventy two
with Dan tep for Giving Freedom of Frame, where he

(46:55):
talked about how the limits are actually what spurs so
much of his invention of his creativity as he's a
a jazz musician working with computer programs. So while this
show is called The Limit Does Not Exist. I can't
help but wonder, in the words of Carrie Bradshaw, if

(47:17):
in fact, the limits might help new things exist. I
don't know. I went there absolutely, Christina. I just want
to keep going to say that the limit does not exist.
When limits do exist, Oh my gosh, I think that
we could really create some kind of Fibonacci spiral of

(47:37):
thought process. We're bringing it home. Let us know if
you have any favorite human ven diagrams from history, we
will consider it for our future shows, and as always,
we love hearing your updates and questions. You can reach
us on Twitter or Instagram at t ldn E pod

(47:57):
or send us an email at Hello t l d
an e podcast dot com, or you can leave us
a voicemail at eight three three high t l d
n E. That's eight three three four eight five three
six three. Then dial eight oh three will link to
Natalie's project, A Pilgrim in Art and Science, the article
we discussed by Brandon Sanderson, and our previous episode with

(48:21):
Natalie's husband, Bur Settles, among other things in our show notes,
which you can find at t l d any podcast
dot com. Slash Thanks so much to our producer Maya Coole,

(48:44):
and to you for tuning in. As always, please subscribe, rate,
and review on Apple podcasts if you like what you heard,
it really helps us get the word out to fellow
human ven diagrams. Until next time, Remember, the limit does
not is it? The limit does not exist is a

(49:06):
production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts, form my
heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
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