What is it?
My name is Katherine Crighton; An Apothecary Dreams is the capstone project for my Master of Fine Arts degree in the Interactive Media and Game Design program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. An Apothecary Dreams is an art/experience installation I’ve developed that allows me to share with you a look into my last three years of research: where, using experimental archaeology and practice-led, arts-based research, I reconstruct household apothecary recipes from 500 years ago using only books and journals written at the time.
Between the early days of blowing up my kitchen (twice) and discovering I’d made a mucilaginous hydrocolloid, I realized that the books I was learning from—that were teaching me to become a natural philosopher, a perfumer, a chemist, an apothecary—were essentially a time capsule of science: When I opened them, I was shown the invention of the scientific method and the sheer human spirit that fuels our drive to both question our world and find answers in it. And through my research, I was contributing to that time capsule, adding more pages to a book that never truly closes.
So for my capstone, I’m inviting you into what it’s felt like, to me, to live within a time capsule opened 500 years ago and still being added to today. Taking place inside WPI’s historic Tudor Revival-style Higgins House, and surrounded by students and faculty working on the cutting edge of scientific research, I bring you into a multisensory dream-like collage of the past and present, seen through the lens of my apothecary research—and give you the opportunity to add your own message to someone opening a time capsule 500 years in the future.
An Apothecary Dreams, and…
The year is 2025
and Katherine Crighton has spent the last three years piecing together the theory and practice of ancient masters to reconstruct household apothecary recipes. This is just part of Katherine’s long experience with stepping in and out of history, though, and their capstone installation reflects the past and present blending together, dream-like, in Katherine’s life and work.
or
The year is 1525
and the printing press has suddenly allowed writers to share their mastery of the arts and sciences with distant apprentices who they might never meet. They test technical language; they try to illustrate what can’t be demonstrated; they invent the science we will someday have. They don’t know yet who might benefit from their work…but they dream of a future that might.
