Katie Paterson

True North is an artwork that emerged from a collaboration between Katie Paterson and Sony, working with the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. The project STAR SPHERE, used a satellite camera specially designed to capture views of Earth from outer space. Hiroshi Sugimoto was the first artist invited to operate the satellite to offer a rare artistic perspective of our planet from above, and Katie Paterson was the second.

The project connects art with advanced technology, creating a bridge between space exploration and environmental awareness. Paterson used the satellite to focus on Arctic polar regions, an area remote, fragile and increasingly impacted by the climate crisis, capturing striking images of melting glaciers and polar icecaps in the North Pole, Ellesmere Island, Greenland and Svalbard. The Arctic landscapes depicted are among the most vulnerable to climate change, with some glaciers already on the brink of vanishing. Strikingly, the images Paterson created may outlast their subject, making True North a haunting and tangible document of a disappearing world.

Typically, however, Paterson has taken the idea a step further, travelling to the Arctic (in partnership with Arctica Svalbard) in order to collect light refracted and reflected through ancient crystalline ice which, stored in photovoltaic panels, was then brought back to the photographic studio and used to develop the images. The resulting photographs, printed using traditional silver gelatin techniques, are presented as a grid of nine images.

Reflecting on the project, Paterson says: “The Arctic light holds the memory of a changing world. What we capture today may soon belong to the past. These images preserve traces of landscapes in flux, where ice, light and time unravel. True North is both witness and memory, documenting a world vanishing before our eyes. These photographs may outlast the glaciers themselves, becoming relics of icy landscapes whose fading light could disappear within a century."