Katie Paterson

Since graduating from the Slade School of Art fifteen years ago Katie Paterson has emerged as one of the leading artists working at the nexus of art and science. The moment of her graduation, in the summer of 2007, saw her camped on the side of an Icelandic ice sheet, relaying the sounds of the melting glacier to her degree show back in London. Since then, she has collaborated with geologists, astronomers, botanists, biologists, meteorologists, palaeontologists, astrophysicists, geneticists, and scientific researchers of almost every conceivable discipline, to realise ideas that consider and question our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change.

Paterson combines a research-based approach with an essentially Romantic and poetic sensibility which invites the viewer into an intimate and philosophical engagement with the natural environment, often collapsing the distance between present day experience and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos. Her work prompts feelings of humility, wonder and sometimes melancholy, recalling something of the 19^th century’s pursuit of the sublime, but realised in a resolutely contemporary manner that is at once understated in gesture, and yet monumental in scope.

Past projects have included clocks that tell the time on distant planets, a map of all the dead stars, a slide archive of darkness from the depths of the Universe, a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, a candle to chart the smells of a journey from Earth to a black hole, a meteorite, re-cast as a mirror of itself and sent back into space, and a future library - a forest of trees in Norway planted to supply paper for an anthology of books to be published in 100-years’ time.