Katie Paterson What Do Artists Do All Day?

OK, so I think this is it. Erm...

..the tallest tree in the UK.

Straight and very tall, the grand fir.

It's, erm, 63 metres high.

So the label has charted the height of the tree since 1931,

where it was 100 foot.

By 1985, 202 feet,

and, erm, at the moment, it is...

It was one of the tallest trees in Britain

because it reached over 60 metres.

They don't prune it very often

so we're also very lucky that we're...

that they've cut a piece for us, and, er, so, yeah,

so we have a piece of this magnificent tree for the artwork.

I wanted to gather together every single tree species on the planet,

without really knowing at that point how many there were.

So, this arboretum, they've donated us...

erm, samples, offcuts from their champion trees.

Erm, the grand fir, which is one of the tallest in the UK,

and, ah, here it is, this is the mightiest conifer in Europe.

Wow, it is enormous.

Beautiful.

So, I think, to become a champion tree, the tree has to be either

one of the tallest or one of the widest, erm, trees,

and so I think this tree actually takes seven people,

arm-in-arm, to fit around it, so it's...

Yeah, as you can see, it's pretty enormous.

So, actually, the piece that we'll have in the artwork is...

It's going to be from this mighty tree,

but actually we'll end up with a kind of hand-held piece inside.

Yeah, that would make a good tree for a treehouse.

Hmm...

SHE MUTTERS

So, basically, I'm going to just label these bits of wood

so that they don't get lost within our other 4,400 pieces,

and I definitely don't want to lose the mightiest conifer in Europe.

Let's see if this sticks on.

Yeah, that should be fine.

And then when we get them back to the studio they'll be

numbered properly and entered into our archive.

Yeah, I'm really glad we've got the tallest tree as well

because it doesn't often get pruned, but it's very nice to hold

this piece of branch knowing that it's come from the tallest tree.

Hollow began a few years ago now.

It's a commission for the University of Bristol Life Sciences building,

and it's a sculpture

but it's also a piece of architecture that people can enter.

Hollow's probably the most ambitious work that I've tried to do so far.

It begun as a very simple idea but it's kind of spiralled

and kind of become bigger and bigger.

So this is our wood studio in Bristol, er,

where we've been storing our 4,400 pieces of wood.

That's where we're at at the moment, we've got another 5,500 to arrive.

Erm, so it's in the centre of Bristol,

the artwork's being created quite close to here,

at the university, so it's been used both as a storage room,

literally, for all the wood, but it's also the place that we've

been archiving and cataloguing every single piece of wood that's come in.

It's absolutely random in terms of

how the numbers all fit together,

because it's just been archived in terms of how all the wood's arrived

to us in the studio, erm,

but we do know exactly what every single piece of wood is,

so we've got a lot of wood that is the standard

International Wood Collectors dimension.

Erm, I think about 80 or 90% of our whole collection's going to be

made of wood this size

because there's a whole community of wood

collectors all over the world that we've acquired

a lot of our wood from, and then, as you can see there, we've got

huge pieces that are from arboretums or that have been gifted to us

from botanical gardens all over the world.

Some of them are still to be kiln-dried and cut.

So many of the wood has been donated, so, for example,

this whole section here, erm, I think is our African donation.

We had 600 species donated from Africa, erm,

and we've had a huge Mexican donation as well.

In fact, the Mexican donation is made up of all these

beautiful twigs, erm, which, remarkably, have all...

You know, they were all numbered, and they're all a different species.

The idea was to try to bring together this great

diversity of trees

and life that kind of told a story in a way of the evolution

of the planet through tree life from the earliest fossilised forests,

erm, all the way to the present day, and encapsulating this

somehow in a work that, erm, that's quite experiential.

So I would like the viewer to feel as if they are

kind of enclosed in this intimate space that unravels

this kind of immensity of tree life, and that they could be standing

inside a forest of every forest on Earth.

Rachel is our wonderful archivist.

She's been helping just catalogue, number, archive,

label every single piece of wood that's come into the studio.

-That's natural.

-I know, that's wood.

It's just not what you expect the inside of a tree to be like.

Every one is different, from the sender

and what information we already have on it, so, for example,

if I put this one up, this is from Gary Green, and all of the

-information is already on there, which is absolutely fantastic.

-Yeah.

So, in terms of me cataloguing it,

we probably had the information already

so we imported it through onto our document.

We know by name pretty much the whole

International Wood Collectors Society.

Yes, yeah!

So, this is the, I think... from one of the oldest trees

in the world, this is Methuselah, which is from Lionel Daniels.

4,846 years old.

So, this, we were so happy to get this because, erm, Lionel Daniels,

a big wood collector, gave us one of the oldest ever trees on the planet,

which we've been trying to hunt down, you know, for a long time now.

-That's absolutely incredible.

-I know, and it's all just...

About a month or two ago,

we were at 4,400 species,

but we've been in talks for a long time with an amazing

collector in Canada, Robert Ritchie,

and he's just decided to give up his whole collection to us,

which is phenomenal, so it's 5,500 species,

so once that's gone through, erm, we'll have...

-Yeah, we'll have hit our target.

-Easily hit the target, yeah.

Yeah, so we're kind of coming to the end,

-actually, of the wood collecting phase, I would say...

-Yes.

..once that's arrived and catalogued,

though that is a big process in itself.

My work as a whole, it's pretty vast, actually,

the territory that I deal with.

I work a lot with space and the cosmos,

and geology and earth.

Usually works fall into those two pretty enormous arenas,

but I'd say all of the works deal with collapsing this distance

between time, nature, space, geology and the cosmos.

So, for example, erm, another work that, erm,

that's going to go on for my whole life is Future Library,

which also involves, you know, trees, wood and the Earth,

and I've planted a forest just outside Oslo that,

in 100 years' time, when it's fully grown, the trees are going to be

cut down, pulped and made into a book that's written now

but isn't read for another 100 years, erm, so we are inviting

one author every year to write a story, write anything they like.

Erm, so, the first two authors for that are Margaret Atwood

and David Mitchell, who also both write through time, so that's a work

that deals with the Earth and time, you know, very much,

so that it kind of catapults through time,

but in a way quite a short timescale of 100 years, you know,

because Hollow has millions of years!

Er, we're in the xylarium, which is

a wood library in Kew Gardens in London.

It's the first time I've ever been to a xylarium, and we're

about to meet Mark Nesbitt, who looks after the whole collection.

He's the curator of economic botany,

and they're kindly donating us a box of samples for Hollow.

-So we've found some more woods for you.

-Oh, fantastic.

-Thank you so much. Box of goodies, yeah.

-Yes, yes.

-Oh, wow!

Yeah, so what's in here?

-Er, birch species here...

-Yeah.

-..hornbeam...

-Yeah.

-..and some more unfamiliar trees as well.

-It's a real mixture of tropical and temperate.

-That's very light.

-Yes, spruce, another really light one.

-That's a light spruce.

-Yeah.

Yeah, these look fantastic.

These are great, thank you very much.

Yeah, it's a pleasure.

Oh, yes, yeah...

So, I mean, overall, in the Economic Botany Collection, in this sort of

huge space that we're in, there's about 95,000 specimens,

but that's all genuses of plants,

and the wood part that we're in now, we've got about 35,000...

35,000, my goodness.

Arranged, really, by plant families,

that's a very botanical organisation about evolution,

so we don't have a catalogue that says exactly what shelf

things are on, cos you don't need to know that.

But you just need to know that...

If you need a name, you can come and find a specimen.

So, this is W3, which is the kind of, erm,

in-between category for unusually shaped pieces of wood.

Oh, this is incredibly light wood here.

It's a piece of light wood from Dutch New Guinea.

Oh, goodness, it almost feels like...

-It's even lighter than balsawood.

-It's lighter than... Yeah.

-Oh, wow, so that's a wood.

-Yeah, yeah.

I've never seen anything like this before.

Yeah, so you've kept as much of the original...

Yeah, this is very much a sort of botanical practice,

that you always keep the documentation with the objects

and with the specimen,

and you add to it as time goes on so you can trace back...

I see, so it's got all these different kind of timelines on it.

So this must be the business card of the person who

originally brought it to Kew,

Mr A Pratt of Elmers Drive in Teddington.

It's been fantastic, because Kew have donated a box of species,

which have obviously come right from their wood collection,

some are rare, some not so rare,

but all of them have some kind of history, and kind of being here

and seeing where they come from is wonderful,

but also, right now we're missing just a few really important pieces.

We're missing, I think, something like seven countries

and then we'll have covered the world.

We're missing four different families,

and a few, really, that we just can't find them anywhere else,

and I think Kew are going to give us a little sample of each of them,

which basically completes our whole collection, so that's amazing.

So, we're at the Arnolfini in Bristol, erm, working on Hollow,

and we're using this massive space,

Gallery One, to sort out our 10,000 pieces of wood,

and I've been mapping out on the floor the different

zones of the artwork, erm, so there's a...

There's the floor, there's the ceiling, there's left upper,

left lower, right upper, right lower, erm,

so we're organising all of the wood into the zones it's going to be

built in in the final artwork.

Given that we have 10,000 pieces of wood, and so we now have this

really thorough record of what every single piece of wood is...

However, organising it's another story,

cos there are so many ways that it could be arranged.

One is through time, which is what I'm the most interested in.

Erm, another is, like, through geography.

We could have the continents separated, erm,

or through species and family, like a kind of...

literally a biological tree of trees.

But actually what we realised is that, in a way, like,

imposing another human narrative on this wood doesn't actually

make that much sense, and instead,

because of the complexity of where all of this wood has come from,

that actually what's way more interesting is fragmenting it all

and what happens when these species go together

that would just never, you know, otherwise sit together.

Yeah, so just now we're going to work on one of the clusters,

the colour, the gradient of colour,

so basically in the, er, lower right zone,

so when you're inside looking down here there's going to be

a gradient of colour of wood that goes from, like,

really dark woods up through the reds to the lighter ones.

So I'm going to go through each zone

and pull out some of the really purply, red and dark colours,

and then eventually we'll put them all in that section

and rearrange them by colour.

I think it was quite apparent that, from a young age,

probably being an artist was what I was going to do.

I went to art school,

where it became quite obvious that I didn't really fit within any

particular department, you know, I would flit around departments,

from, you know, the kind of design departments,

even architecture, and I ended up doing

a really interdisciplinary course which suited me a lot.

I actually, at many points, tried to avoid being an artist

because it's, you know...

I think a lot of people have the idea that it's maybe an easy

or very fulfilling, you know, profession. And it is fulfilling,

definitely, but it's not easy at all, and especially with the kind of

projects that I've ended up doing, it is really demanding and difficult

and stressful, and, you know, there's a whole number of things

that I would never have predicted as being an artist's work.

What I did was...

..took apart all...

Well, first of all, I had to order them by size and shape for the...

So, this is Jon Bridle.

He's an evolutionary biologist at the University of Bristol,

and we've been having lots of discussions about the

organisation, especially, of the wood inside the interior of Hollow.

That's something that comes out really quite quickly, for me -

at least, from this work, it's really quite striking -

is how the connections, you don't have to impose them now because

all these organisms are so closely related, they're all angiosperms.

-Yeah.

-You only have to go back, you know, some of them

-just a few 100,000 years, and you'll find...

-And the connection's there?

Yeah, you'll find a population where they would have had sex

-with each other...

-Yeah, yeah.

..at some recent time in the past, and now they might be living

in completely different places or

having completely different habitats that they use.

Yeah, and even the area fossils that we have there at the back,

you know, that kind of roots all the way back through the deep time

to the first trees, the first forests, and even algae.

Yeah, a lot of what we've been talking about are these

interconnections between all of them

and how to even think about structuring the inside of this.

Science progresses by...

us being wrong about stuff, but in quite clever ways.

And, in a way, I mean,

I think there are as many connections between science

and art in that sense that good science

and good art makes you feel, at least makes me feel, quite humble.

It shows you something that you didn't imagine before,

that makes you re-examine something you thought you understood but

actually has much more depth than you imagined,

because the real world is much more strange than we can even imagine.

You know, fact must be stranger than fiction,

because fiction only contains the things that we can imagine,

so, you know, art is giving us this new way, or can,

and science too takes us right to the threshold of what we know

and shows us new ways to imagine the world.

And things we thought we understood, that we were familiar with,

suddenly become much deeper and much more complex,

but art really helps me to escape my preconceptions about the world.

So, on Wednesday, all the wood's getting taken to the fabricator,

so on Friday we all have a big meeting,

the architects are coming from Mexico, and we're all going to

sit round and, like, sign off the final designs,

and then after that it goes full into production.

All the wood will be cut, erm, and then it'll be fabricated into the

structure, so I think we're working on it in separate panels,

and bit by bit, so it'll be quite a fluid process.

We're at millimetre in Brighton, and they're a really big, erm,

artwork fabricators.

They work for architects and artists,

and they've produced really large-scale, difficult artworks.

So, these are all of our wood collection.

This bit is still being cut, this is what's been cut,

and these are some of our really special pieces that, erm,

that we're going to cut today, so that's exciting.

Erm, this is from the grand fir at Ardkinglas Arboretum,

and then this is our interior shell,

where we're attaching all the 10,000 pieces of wood.

So this is day two of working on it.

The whole shell, obviously, has been constructed in advance,

but now we're doing the final work,

we're sticking every single piece of wood into our shell.

Obviously, already you can see,

if you just take one small section,

there's a lot of different things going on with the colours

and the forms, and we're kind of cutting as we go, but then just,

you know, if we need a smaller piece we've just got it right there,

so we just cut it, stick it right in.

But, you know, the thing that I've got to be careful with is

I can't get too stuck on looking at every single piece cos

there's, you know, 10,000, and we'll be here for the rest of my life,

just about, if I start looking at every single one.

Will those be difficult to cut down or just need...?

You'll have to run them over the planer to get a flat side first.

Just take a bit of time, and then once you've got one flat side

you can put them over the saw and square them off.

-Yeah.

-So you'll end up...

You know, if you want to get that perfectly square

you'll end up with something that's about that big.

-Yeah.

-I mean, that one might...

Yeah, that looks...

-The holly might disintegrate.

-Oh, what a shame, I hope not.

I don't think so, though, cos if we base it

around the heart of the tree, then it should stay together.

The collaborative aspect of my work is at the forefront, really,

it's really important to everything.

You know, I need the expertise of all the people that are fabricating

this, and sure, I can kind of glue on some samples,

but really it's a kind of...

It's all of this that's gone into the work that is

the artwork at the end of the day.

Saying that, I like a quite hands-on approach still.

I'm always there, you know, when my work's being made,

and definitely not the kind of artist that kind of sends off

an e-mail with the drawing in it, and then, you know, it arrives.

That's definitely not my approach.

-I'm going to keep these ones.

-Really nice dark one, that.

-Yeah!

So we're going to end up not cutting most of them anyway!

-No, let's cut that one.

-Yeah.

-Oh, how can we cut that? I mean...

Right, I'm keeping these aside,

I'm just going to put these in as a whole, cos they're lovely.

We're going to cut the piece of wood from Ardkinglas,

the champion tree, grand fir, so...

So, we'll just... We can take off...

-Take off that bit.

-..that side...

Yeah, yeah, I think that side and that side,

and we'll leave that, cos that's really nice.

I think, erm, I've never actually seen a piece of tree become

a piece of wood till now, so it's really nice.

Look at that.

So, today is the day that we're installing Hollow.

At last it's come.

Erm, this is the first time I've actually seen it as a whole piece,

and it's about to get craned in over this ancient wall.

Today's the first day of installation.

We've got another four to go.

So the site's in action, all the team are here installing it,

the final piece has been craned in, the interior's just about finished,

but the rest of the site is being finished over the next few days.

So, we're going to take a look for the first time.

I'm...I'm feeling good being inside Hollow, seeing it here with

the light coming in and feeling what it feels like to be inside it.

Weeks and weeks and weeks in the workshop, but it feels so different

when it's actually out here in the landscape,

where it's going to be for the rest of its life.

I hope people come in, take some quiet time from the university,

but from anywhere, because it's a public, open space.

It's an artwork for, you know, for anybody to come in.

I'm pleased that we did put

so much effort into this idea of time flowing through it, so that the

most ancient trees are to the base, and then it works its way up,

and if you look into the ceiling,

that's where the extinct or near endangered trees are,

so it's almost like you're looking up into the present day

when you look up into the sky.

So, this is a piece from the grand fir, erm, from Ardkinglas,

so it's made it here.

Every piece of wood was cut into two,

and we've kept the second part to form a second wood collection,

basically, for the University of Bristol,

and that'll all be open to the public,

so the university will have a complete collection of the wood.

I feel really grateful, actually, that I've somehow stumbled

into this work that, erm, to begin with seemed totally impossible.

I would be turning up with a little bit of paper with an absurd

idea on it that could probably never, ever be made,

and Hollow is, you know,

a good example of trying to collect a planet's worth of trees.

You can say it in a few words but actually making that happen is

a few years of research and working with huge networks of people.

I'll have ideas that seem completely out of reach,

but I think if I gave up at the first hurdle, you know,

none of these things would have happened.