'From the first moment I listened to stories about the night sky, I fell in love with astronomy and physics. Not just the stars or galaxies but also the why and how of it all.
'What happened before the Big Bang? What are we made of? How will the universe end? I am not a scientist, just eternally curious and have made scientific research the basis for a great deal of my poetry. The cosmos is endlessly fascinating. And writeable.
'I have been fortunate enough to work alongside inspiring scientists and have read and listened to many more. Scientists regularly and successfully use vivid storytelling and poetics, using metaphor to weave into their factual narrative. It can be an indispensable tool, helping us understand something like Newton’s second law of thermodynamics or dark matter.
'Sometimes, adding abstraction (poetry) on top of abstraction (difficult to understand scientific concepts) can feel like you’re going on a side quest. In those splinters of time, I hope you stay with me.
'Physicist Niels Bohr said, ‘What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words. We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others.’
'With this, I am humbly grateful and thankful to be suspended in language with you.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'I feel a sense of delight at the idea of an artist surreptitiously working in a science lab. There is something mischievous, rambunctious, even anarchistic about it. The idea of intervention. I have always thought that the disciplines that exist under the broad umbrellas of science and art are in some ways artificial necessities for the organisation of various institutions. Of course, science and art embody different ways of knowing, of epistemological knowledge-making, but there are forms of art that bleed together with scientific practice more so than two disciplines thought of as sciences – consider the techniques used in optical microscopy and cinematography (both lens based practices), versus geology and biomedical science (rocks versus the messy stuff of humans and disease).' (Introduction)
'I feel a sense of delight at the idea of an artist surreptitiously working in a science lab. There is something mischievous, rambunctious, even anarchistic about it. The idea of intervention. I have always thought that the disciplines that exist under the broad umbrellas of science and art are in some ways artificial necessities for the organisation of various institutions. Of course, science and art embody different ways of knowing, of epistemological knowledge-making, but there are forms of art that bleed together with scientific practice more so than two disciplines thought of as sciences – consider the techniques used in optical microscopy and cinematography (both lens based practices), versus geology and biomedical science (rocks versus the messy stuff of humans and disease).' (Introduction)
