Katie Paterson, born Glasgow, 1981, is regarded as an artist working at the forefront of her generation. Collaborating with leading scientists and researchers across the world, her poetic and conceptual projects consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Her artworks make use of sophisticated technologies and specialist expertise to stage intimate, poetic and philosophical engagements between people and their natural environment.
Combining a Romantic sensibility with a research-based approach and coolly minimalist presentation, collapsing the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos. The artist has described her own work as ‘merging the microcosm with the macrocosm’, but curator Erica Burton explains her approach more fully, saying she ‘engages with the landscape, as a physical entity and as an idea. Drawing on our experience of the natural world, she creates an expanded sense of reality beyond the purely visible.’ Lisa le Feuvre, the Director of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, comments similarly, ‘Paterson looks to the stars, the seas, the earth and, with an ethical generosity, invites consideration of how we might attempt to understand these limits.’
Recent solo presentations of Paterson’s work include Evergreen at Galleri F15, Moss, Norway (2022), To Burn, Forest, Fire at IHME Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland (2021), The Earth Has Many Keys at NYLO The Living Art Museum, Reykavík, Iceland (2021); NOW at The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2020); A place that exists only in moonlight at Turner Contemporary, Margate (2019) and Syzygy at The Lowry, Manchester (2016).
Her work is held in public collections internationally including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA; Princeton University Library, USA; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Massachusetts, USA, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney Australia, FRA Franche-Comté, France, Edinburgh University, UK and Arts Council Collection UK. Her recent commission Mirage, using sand collected from deserts across earth, is a permanent public sculpture for Apple Park, California.
Paterson’s ongoing artwork Future Library was launched in 2014 and will take a century to manifest, reaching completion in 2114. The 100-year artwork began with a forest growing in Norway, which will later make paper for an anthology of, as yet unprinted, texts. Meanwhile one writer every year will contribute a text to the Future Library Trust, with the writings held in a secure library, unread and unpublished, until 2114. A signed and numbered certificate is available to purchase, and all bearers of this certificate will receive the anthology of the 100 texts when the project comes to fruition in 2114. Writers to date include Margaret Atwood, David Mitchell, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Ocean Vuong.
Paterson’s work Requiem was also shown at Ingleby in the spring of 2022, an artwork that tells the story of the birth and life of our planet in a single object using dust gathered from material dating from pre-solar times to those of the present. Paterson has been selected for the Folkestone Triennial 2025, one of the UK’s leading contemporary art festivals, and will be presenting a new and ambitious site-specific installation, which will be on view from mid July.