• News   |  

    Mirage

    Katie Paterson and Zeller & Moye have been commissioned by Apple to create a public permanent artwork at the Apple Campus in Cupertino, USA. This public sculpture for the olive grove adjacent to the Visitor Center at Apple Park, has been created from cylinders of pure cast glass, made of sand collected from deserts across the Earth. Sand from subtropical deserts, coastal, rain-shadow, interior, mountainous, volcanic and fossilized deserts were melted into glass. Over four-hundred cast glass columns combine every desert on Earth into a wave-like form, mimicking a desert dune. Visitors can interact with the artwork, walking alongside and through it, where the glass subtly melts into the landscape, like a desert mirage. The artwork is open to the public.

    www.mirage.place

  • News   |  

    The Future Library silent room is now open!

    Last year’s handover ceremony was a very special event, a milestone for a visionary project: not only the annual handover took place, but this year three acclaimed authors were part of the ceremony, which included the opening of the manuscripts’ resting place, the silent room in the new public library Deichman Bjørvika. The silent room will be home to all of the manuscripts contributed to the project until their eventual publication in the year 2114. The room is designed by artist Katie Paterson and architects Atelier Oslo and Lund Hagem. Watch the 2022 handover film here.

    www.futurelibrary.no

  • News   |  

    Sustainability Workshop, Norman Foster Foundation | October 10–14, 2022

    While there is an imperative to ensure human survival in the face of climate change, learning from nature’s intricate systems is crucial to ensuring a good quality life for all living things. What if the boundary between humans and ecosystems didn’t exist? What if we could transform our waste into nutrients for other organisms? The Norman Foster Foundation presents a new session of its Sustainability Workshop. The Academic Body brings together a wide range of practitioners from different fields related to biointegrated and ecologic design. The Academic Body includes: Stefano Boeri, Founder and Director of Stefano Boeri Archiecti; Cristina Iglesias, Spanish Artist and Sculptor; Mitchell Joachim, Co-founder of Terreform ONE and Associate Professor of Practice at New York University; Mohsen Mostafavi, Alexander and Victoria Wiley Professor of Design and Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University; Brenda Parker, Associate Professor of Sustainable Bioprocess Design at the Department of Biochemical Engineering of University College London; Claudia Pasquero, Co-founder of ecoLogicStudio in London, Landscape Architecture Professor at Innsbruck University and Associated Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture; Katie Paterson, Scottish Artist; Marco Poletto, Co-founder of ecoLogicStudio in London; and architect, theorist and urban planner, Moshe Safdie.

  • Exhibition   |  

    Evergreen, Katie Paterson, Galleri F15, Moss, Norway, 28 May – 5 October 2022

    Katie Paterson’s first solo show in Norway at Galleri F15 comprised several new artworks including —there lay the Days between— and Evergreen.

  • News   |  

    Requiem, Katie Paterson at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, UK, 9th April – 11th June, 2022.

    An exhibition by Katie Paterson at Ingleby Gallery brought together dust gathered from material dating from pre-solar times to those of the present.

  • Watch   |  

    Katie Paterson on TED: Why connecting to deep time matters to us all

    Short-sightedness may be the greatest threat to humanity, says conceptual artist Katie Paterson, whose work engages with deep time – an idea that describes the history of the Earth over a time span of millions of years. In this lively talk, she takes us through her art – a telephone line connected to a melting glacier, maps of dying stars – and presents her latest project: the Future Library, a forested room holding unread manuscripts from famous authors, not to be published or read until the year 2114.

  • Read   |  

    Katie Paterson in Kinfolk, Issue 40

    Katie Paterson’s garage contains moon dust. It’s stored alongside offcuts from a mammoth’s thighbone and a collection of wood samples from 10, 000 different trees, each acquired in the name of art. In her work, Paterson poses searching existential questions in the form of poetic acts, whether that be setting up a live phone line to a melting glacier, sending a meteorite back into space or bouncing a recording of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata off the surface of the moon…

  • Read   |  

    Julian Charrière And Katie Paterson: Meteors And Metabolisms, by Nicolas Bourriaud
    “Katie Paterson and Julian Charrière are currently exhibiting in parallel. In both of their oeuvres, human existence itself is not shown, but is instead resituated in its cosmic or geological position, represented in the general context of the biomass. And both, in their respective works, implement temporalities of great amplitude. Their works could thus belong to a neo-metaphysical movement in contemporary art, which will undoubtedly remain associated with the beginning of the twenty-first century in future accounts of the history of art. Because the essential question for the artists of our time is the meaning of their work in a world in danger.”

  • Exhibition   |  

    Ideas, Katie Paterson, Edinburgh University Kings Building Campus

    What time is it on Venus? What will be read by unborn people? Is it possible to plant a forest using saplings from the oldest tree on earth? Can we make ink to be read only under moonlight? Katie Paterson’s Ideas pose questions about deep time, and the limit of what is real and what is imagined. In the largest site responsive presentation of the work to date, one hundred existing and newly created Ideas have been brought together and installed across selected locations at the University of Edinburgh’s King’s Buildings campus. The Ideas are located across an array of buildings (both outside and in), as well as in gardens, grounds and hidden and unexpected places, at varying levels, high and low. Each short text concerns the landscape, the universe, or an expanded sense of earthly and geological time. Ideas is a permanent commissioned by the University of Edinburgh’s College of Science and Engineering, and is open to visit daily.

  • Listen   |  

    The Earth Has Many Keys: Andri Snær Magnason in conversation with Katie Paterson

    In this podcast, Katie Paterson and writer Andri Snær Magnason talk about the world we live in, the catastrophic consequences of the human race’s behaviour, and how art can be a power of change.

  • News   |  

    To Burn, Forest, Fire, new website

    To Burn, Forest, Fire consists of the scent of the first-ever forest on earth and the scent of the last forest of the age of climate crisis, made into incense. It was burned across a variety of sites around the city of Helsinki in 2021, as IHME’s 2021 commission. Visit our new website to explore films, texts, and more.

    www.to-burn-forest-fire.com

  • Listen   |  

    The Art (and Pop Culture) of Getting Long Time

    As we move towards 2022 so many of us are burnt out and overwhelmed: by the pandemic; by the uncertainty of the future; and by huge challenges like climate change, systemic racism, and inequality. The Long Time Academy is a new podcast that steps into this space with one clear message: changing the way we choose to engage with time can be life-changing, both when it comes to the problems we’re facing day to day, and to the huge threats we’re facing as a species. Brian Eno, Katie Paterson, Bridgit Antoinette Evans, Anab Jain, Jeremy Lent and Sherri Mitchell are part of a 40 strong faculty who have come together to teach one of the most important classes of 2021. Hosted by co-founder of The Long Time Project, Ella Saltmarshe, The Long Time Academy hopes to give listeners a sense of spaciousness, awe and passion to become good ancestors.

    www.thelongtimeacademy.com

  • Exhibition   |  

    Katie Paterson at Kunsthaus Zurich

    Earth Beats, October 4, 2021 – February 6, 2022, Zurich, Switzerland

  • Listen   |  

    To Burn, Forest, Fire | Katie Paterson and David Haskell in conversation

  • News   |  

    Endling, a new artwork by Katie Paterson is on show at Galleri Tschudi til March 2022.

  • Read   |  

    On the aromas of the first and last forests, by David Haskell

    “Humans have used incense for thousands of years, mostly as a bridge to what dwells beyond the everyday, through prayer, oblation, and ritual. To Burn, Forest, Fire places that experience into the context of deep time and the living Earth community.”

  • Read   |  

    Contemporary artists pay homage to land art legend Nancy Holt, Wallpaper Magazine, 2022

    At the 12th-century Lismore Castle, Ireland, a group show ‘Light and Language’ explores the enduring legacy of American conceptual and land art pioneer Nancy Holt. Scottish artist Katie Paterson has created a new work responding to the architecture of Lismore Castle. Her ‘Ideas’ wall pieces are subtle: short texts that ‘when read come alive through the visitor’s imaginations’. Discrete in scale, they are cut from silver and reflect brightly when the light hits them. The artist reflects on her affinity with Holt’s artistic sensibilities: ‘her work showed me how expansive art can be; through its material form (she worked across mediums) it’s scale, its conceptual language and emotional and perceptual impact. Nancy Holt worked with the cyclical time of the universe, the motions of the earth and the sun. She aimed to ‘connect people with the planet earth’, to bring ‘the sky down to earth’ which chimes very much with my approach.’ 

  • Watch   |  

    Artist talk

    Katie Paterson answers questions on Future Library 2014-211, National Galleries of Scotland

  • Watch   |  

    Artist Talk: Katie Paterson, Princeton University Art Museum

    Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Katie Paterson creates projects that consider our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. Join the artist as she creates a unique sonic journey. We will move from calling a glacier in Iceland to listening to the split-second tone of a star dying in the distant universe to hearing the full recital of a musical score she transmitted to the moon. Paterson will also explore artworks that involve silence, and those that exist entirely in the imagination.

  • Watch   |  

    Katie Paterson’s talk at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) Visiting Artists Program

    Katie Paterson is known for her multidisciplinary and conceptually driven work with an emphasis on nature, ecology, geology, and cosmology. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, Paterson’s 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.

  • Listen   |  

    Shock Waves, Artist Katie Paterson, BBC Radio 4

    Katie Paterson is one of the leading artists of her generation. Much of her work explores our place on earth in relation to geological or even cosmic time. As the pandemic brought many aspects of our lives to a halt, and caused various projects and exhibitions to be cancelled or delayed, she’s been exploring how this break in life’s continuum is affecting artistic creativity.

    Comparing notes with other artists – including Edmund de Waal, who’s had his most creative year ever, and Peter Liversidge, who saw a gallery that he’d been preparing an exhibition for close – she reflects on the artistic shock waves of the pandemic and its unexpected consequences.

  • Watch   |  

    Art for Lunch: A Conversation with Katie Paterson

     Katie Paterson joins James Cohan in conversation to discuss Paterson’s experience making art during quarantine and her work’s exploration of deep time, the cosmos, and the place of humans in relation to these phenomena.

  • Watch   |  

    BBC Ideas | Do we need to re-think our ideas of time?

    As a society, we’re so focused on the short term. But is this wrecking the environment? Do we need to think more long term? If so, how?

  • Watch   |  

    The Long Time Sessions – Art & The Distant Edges Of Time, The Long Time Project

    Katie Paterson is one of the leading artists of her generation. Collaborating with scientists and researchers across the world, her work considers our place on Earth in the context of geological time and change. She has created projects like All the Dead Stars that maps 27,000 dead stars and Future Library, a newly planted forest of 1,000 trees near Oslo will be tended for 100 years. Each year, an author writes a book and gives it to the library to be buried. The first was Margaret Atwood; the latest is South Korean Han Kang. In 2114, the trees will be harvested to print and reveal Paterson’s anthology of 100 books.  In this session Katie explores her art and the distant edges of time.

  • Read   |  

    Message to the Moon: Katie Paterson’s Life in Astronomy, Frieze, profile, Issue 204

    Contemplating deep space and ‘cosmic archaeology’, the artist reflects on her fascination with the universe beyond planet Earth.

    “I was sitting in a cupboard in Reykjavik when I learned that it was possible to send messages to the moon. I was scrolling through pages of lunar information and came across the technology ‘Earth-Moon-Earth’, which allows messages to be sent to the moon and back, fragmented by space and distance. Later, walking under a full moon, I imagined what messages I might transmit there myself….” Katie Paterson

  • Exhibition   |  

    Katie Paterson at Hayward Gallery, Winter Light

    Katie Paterson’s artworks often reveal the beauty and poetry in the natural phenomena of our planet and beyond. For Totality she has created a large mirrorball using over 10,000 images of solar eclipses, each image printed as a single mirrored fragment. The images depict the many states of eclipse – from partial to total – while their corresponding reflections dance across the walls of the surrounding space.

  • News   |  

    Tsitsi Dangarembga’s next work won’t be read by anyone until 2114, The Guardian

    The Zimbabwean writer joins authors including Margaret Atwood and Ocean Vuong who have agreed to lock away new writing in the Future Library.

  • Listen   |  

    Only Artists – Katie Paterson meets David Mitchell 

    In this BBC radio documentary, the artist Katie Paterson meets the novelist David Mitchell. Katie Paterson is an award-winning artist whose conceptual works have included the sounds of melting glaciers and a map of 27,000 dead stars. She also sent a meteorite back into space. The best-selling author David Mitchell has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize twice – for number9dream and Cloud Atlas.

    www.bbc.co.uk

  • Read   |  

    Interview, Paterson, Artist of deep time, Nature Magazine

    Philip Ball talks to Katie Paterson, whose artworks take on climate change, Moon dust and the death of stars.

  • Read   |  

    Art review: NOW, The Scotsman

    The focus of this final NOW moment is Glasgow-born Katie Paterson, with the first major presentation of her work in Scotland. Like the celestial bodies she concerns herself with, Paterson’s work evolves slowly, and this show brings together projects from the last decade. Embracing ideas of cosmic scale and significance, she has developed quietly ingenious ways of fitting them inside our heads. Applying both rigorous research and rigorous conceptualism, she takes material which often appears closed and distant and cracks it open, finding not existential angst but a kind of wonder and poetry.

  • Read   |  

    Katie Paterson, Sculpture Magazine

    Scottish artist Katie Paterson has described time as the “material” with which she creates her work. In this modest but significant survey her playful, rigorously researched works tick with the passing of millennia as stars die, solar eclipses pass, and planets spin. Shown across six rooms, the show brings together 11 works from 2007 to the present and marks—with separate contributions from Darren Almond, Shona Macnaughton, and Lucy Raven—the final exhibition in the gallery’s contemporary art series “NOW.”

  • Read   |  

    How to future-proof a work of art that will not be completed for 100 years, The Art Newspaper

    As Katie Paterson’s sand castle project goes on tour, we look at how her Future Library is being made to outlive the artist.

  • Watch   |  

    What Do Artists Do All Day: Katie Paterson, BBC 4

    Katie Paterson and Zeller&Moye’s public artwork, Hollow, is made out of 10,000 samples of different tree species and unveiled in Bristol in early May. This film follows Katie over a ten-month period as she assembles the wood collection and creates the artwork. Sourced from all around the world, her samples include the oldest tree in the world, a tree that survived a nuclear blast and many trees that are now extinct. Katie’s quest to collect tree samples takes her to an arboretum in Scotland and the national wood collection at Kew, to create an artwork designed to inspire wonder at the evolution of trees through time and the fragility of life on our planet.

  • Listen   |  

    Behind the Scenes, Katie Paterson – The Matter of Time, BBC Radio 4

    Scottish artist Katie Paterson offers us back the universe, with the help of experts in science and technology. On this journey, we’ll hear more from Paterson about her work as an artist, and report on her nationwide project First There is a Mountain, which takes place on beaches around Britain. We also hear about the room at her grandmother’s house where, as a child, she’d lock herself in to have visions. Katie Paterson was born in Glasgow in 1981, studied at Edinburgh College of Art then spent a year living in Iceland before embarking on a master’s at the Slade. She returned to Iceland to work as a waitress when the night sky became her obsession. She has pursued projects which engage a variety of scientific specialisms, especially astronomy and astrophysics. She’s been an artist-in-residence at University College London and is in regular contact with academic departments, observatories and amateur astronomers around the world.

  • Read   |  

    I’ve breathed in some crazy things from outer space’ – Katie Paterson’s cosmic art, The Guardian

    The artist who once sent a meteorite back into orbit is now looking for the heavenly in Turner’s paintings, in a show that explodes with moonlight and gamma ray confetti.

  • Read   |  

    Katie Paterson feature in Harper’s Bazar, Quantum Leap

    Katie Paterson’s visionary exploration of time, space and the beauty of the cosmos.

  • Exhibition   |  

    James Cohan: Twenty Years

    James Cohan is pleased to present James Cohan: Twenty Years, a special group exhibition celebrating the gallery’s twentieth anniversary.

  • Listen   |  

    The art project that will take 100 years to grow

    Mary Anne Hobbs meets Katie Paterson of Future Library, a project which is currently busy growing in a forest in Norway…Paterson is gathering 100 stories from celebrated authors about ‘imagination’ and ‘time’, every year for a century. The books will remained unpublished until the year 2114, when they will be printed on paper from the forest’s trees, ready for the next generation.

  • News   |  

    Artist Katie Paterson raises money for domestic abuse victims at risk during coronavirus outbreak

    For a charitable donation, the Scottish visual artist is selling 1,000 digital copies of one of her books based on the universe. 

  • Listen   |  

    BBC Radio 4, Wireless Nights

    Jarvis Cocker navigates the ether as he continues his nocturnal exploration of the human condition. On a night voyage across a sea of shortwave he meets those who broadcast, monitor and harvest electronic radio transmissions after dark. Artist Katie Paterson and ‘Moonbouncer’ Peter Blair send Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata to the moon and back, to find sections of it swallowed up by craters.

  • Watch   |  

    Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?, BBC 4

    Dr James Fox embarks on an open-minded guide for the perplexed and asks ‘What is conceptual art?’, ‘How should we approach it?’ and crucially, ‘Why should we care?’. Roaming between the past, present and future he examines a mind-bending selection of the most influential conceptual ideas and artworks, alongside meeting the leading movers and shakers of today. And who knows? In the end, Dr Fox might find himself unexpectedly seduced by this trickiest of art forms.

  • Watch   |  

    A Place That Exists Only In Moonlight: Katie Paterson & JMW Turner | Turner Contemporary

    Watch artist Katie Paterson talk about art and science, space and time. See her awe-inspiring artworks inspired by astronomy and cosmology, the imagination, the natural world and the entire universe. In this film, Paterson also discusses her fascination with JMW Turner’s paintings that relate to the natural world, including moonscapes, glaciers, and mountains, and well as both artists’ shared connection with Margate. Paterson notes the astonishing colours of the coastal environment in Thanet, the sunsets and the wild seas.

  • Read   |  

    First There is a Mountain, Anthology


    “Lift a handful of sand, let it slip between your fingers and contemplate the eons that have passed, the civilisations that have risen and crumbled away before time milled it to this fineness. It drifts and obscures, burying crops, grazing land, cities and entire civilisations; yet sometimes it shifts to reveal what has been lost.” James Attlee

    “Someone once tried to explain the concept of infinity to me by saying that if an eagle flew past a mountain every million years and touched it lightly with its wingtip, by the time the mountain had crumbled to nothing, that might equate to one second of forever.” Helen Pheby

    “An expanse of sand is the most eternal of landscapes and the most changeable. As we build our mountains, we remember that our labours are ephemeral, our lives are short and everything must change.” Patrick Barkham

    “Sand is mesmerising: both ordinary and enchanted, intimate and infinite, a  marker of time – the three-minute egg: the five-minute essay – as well as of infinities of scale…” Richard Hamblyn

    “How small, how fragile can a work of art be before it drifts away on the wind or floats out to sea? And how large, or long-drawn-out, before we are unable to apprehend it all at once?” Brian Dillon

  • Exhibition   |  

    Katie Paterson has created the 30th and final work for Ingleby Gallery’s public art project Billboard for Edinburgh.

    Paterson’s billboard image is one of her Ideas sentences. These are short haiku-like statements reveal some of Paterson’s most exciting and seemingly impossible ideas. Paterson has gone on to realise a number of these poetic phrases as physical artworks. What gradually becomes clear with Paterson’s work is that the distance between the realised and the unrealisable is not to be relied upon.

  • News   |  

    Katie Paterson, Monograph

    This first comprehensive overview covering the work of Katie Paterson is hardback, 256 pages, 289 colour illustrations with a foreword by Nicolas Bourriaud and essays by Mary Jane Jacob, Lisa Le Feuvre and Lars Bang Larsen. The artworks in this book have been ordered as a ‘time telescope’, by duration – seconds, minutes, hours, years and light years.