Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight, Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) and Ideas (A place that extists only in moonlight)

Scottish artist Katie Peterson’s works are steeped in poetry, play and mysticism. She is fascinated by nature and natural sciences, especially astronomy, and often translates laboriously accumulated scientific knowledge into works of subtle humour that act as wormholes where the cosmic meets the everyday banal.

Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight (2008) is composed of a specially manufactured light bulb that simulates the spectral characteristics of moonlight. In collaboration with the lighting company OSRAM, Paterson produced a series of sets of such bulbs, each containing 289 bulbs to provide an average person alive in 2008 with a life-time supply of moonlight.

Accompanying Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight is a sound installation by Paterson titled Earth-Moon-Earth (Moonlight Sonata Reflected from the Surface of the Moon) (2007). For this, she translated the score of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata into Morse code and then bounced it off the moon using radio transmission. When the reflected waves were received back, part of the information had been absorbed by the moon’s surface, ‘lost’ to its shadows and craters. The reflected code, altered thus by its contact with the moon, was translated back to create a new sonata where those parts in the original that were lost to the moon act as intervals and rests. A recording of the moon-altered sonata is played on a record player in the gallery.

Also displayed is a work from a series by Paterson called Ideas, composed of short haiku-like sentences that, according to the artist, turn “some of her unrealisable ideas into impossible statements of intent”.