Warped Space, in Paint and Poetry
Extract from the Prologue of The Warped Side of Our Universe. (Expansion. Ink on drafting film 2019, by Lia Halloran.)
This spring, Los Angeles-based artist Lia Halloran was to have joined Caltech as artist-in-residence in the Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences as part of the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. COVID-19 upended those plans, and Halloran’s residency has been postponed until the spring of 2021.
The past few months have been busy for Halloran, however, as she has put the finishing touches on a book project she has been working on for more than a decade with Kip Thorne (BS ’62), Caltech’s Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, and one of the recipients of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. The book, The Warped Side of Our Universe, is to be published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2021 and features poetic verse by Thorne alongside paintings by Halloran.
As an associate professor of art at Chapman University, Halloran has exhibited her work widely in the United States and Europe. In 2016, her art installation Deep Sky Companion opened at Caltech’s Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. For that exhibit, Halloran used painting and photographic techniques to create 110 prints inspired by the 18th-century French comet hunter Charles Messier.
Caltech magazine recently talked with Halloran and Thorne about their creative partnership.
Lia Halloran: During my first year of graduate school at Yale I started reading Kip’s book Black Holes & Time Warps (W. W. Norton & Company, 1994). There was something about the way Kip described this odd warping and bending of space that just made me feel transported. Most of the paintings in my MFA thesis exhibit were based on reading what Kip wrote. So, I was collaborating with him before I even met him.
Then, in 2007, I was at a cocktail party in Pasadena and overheard someone say his name. I perked up and said, “Kip Thorne is here? I have to meet him.” I went up to him, and I was effusively and unapologetically sharing how much of an impact his writing had on my artwork. He said there was “a young filmmaker” interested in making a film about his science and perhaps I could help him visualize it. The director was Steven Spielberg. So we started this wonderful dialogue where Kip would come to my studio and talk, and then, after about 45 minutes, my head would get hot from the mind-blowing things Kip was describing about the universe, and I’d try to put his ideas into an image or even some very simple doodles. He used those doodles as a way to explain how time and space could be visualized in the early, early conception of the movie Interstellar. [Spielberg left the project in 2009; it was ultimately directed by Christopher Nolan.] We not only became collaborators but also developed a wonderful love and respect for each other.
Felicia and the Black Hole. Ink on drafting film 2017, by Lia Halloran.
Kip Thorne: In her paintings and pencil sketches, Lia captures for me, as well as for nonscientists, the essence of objects and phenomena that are made from warped spacetime rather than from matter: the warped side of the universe. That’s why her sketches were so helpful to me in my planning discussions for Interstellar, first with Spielberg and later with Christopher Nolan and his brother, screenwriter Jonathan Nolan. Lia’s creativity and skills as an artist, her enthusiasm and easy communication with me, and her familiarity with the essence of science make her a great collaborator.
Halloran: At one point, Kip was invited to write an article for Playboy, and he asked me to do the artwork. So, he wrote a 6,000-word article about black holes and wormholes, and I made eight little paintings. We sent it over to Playboy and got an email back saying that Hugh Hefner had rejected my artwork because it didn’t look like the iconic style of Leonard Nimoy’s drawings. Sometimes, failure is the best thing that can ever happen to you! We’d had so much fun working together that we continued meeting, me making paintings and Kip expanding his prose, until we realized we had a book on our hands.
Thorne: I had honed the prose of our Playboy article so it flowed nicely and had a nice ring to it. Then, when Lia’s friend did the first layout for our book, she broke some of my prose into stanzas. When I first saw this, it became obvious to me that what I had was almost poetic verse. The only verse I had written previously was love poems to my wife on her birthdays.
Halloran: At that point, Kip decided to rewrite all the prose into verse form. With so much of science, many people don’t feel like it’s theirs. But if we change the format, that can be a very different way to approach it. How many poems about black holes are out there? We really hope that the poetry community, the art world, and the physics community will all claim it as their book.
Thorne: I hope to inspire readers of all sorts to see the weird and wonderful beauty of the warped side of the universe and to convey to them the ethos and essence of this strange bit of science. My words could not possibly do that by themselves. Lia’s paintings, tightly integrated with the words, are essential.