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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 19th 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.
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REQUIEM
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(547 MYR) The first true skeletons: sediment surrounding Cloudina carinata, Driedoornvlakte, Rietoog, Hardap Region, Namibia
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(70 MYR) Silts from an ancient ocean floor in Antarctica containing fossil woods from lush forests Seymour Island, East Coast of Antarctica Peninsula
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(900 -1,100 CEE) Medieval Viking coral beaded necklace, Denmark
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(2,006 CE) Bee pollen, colony collapse disorder, Northern Spain
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The recent works that formed the core of this exhibition have seen her increasingly concerned with the fate of our planet and a series of new commissions included what she has described as her most political work to date – Requiem - an urn filled with dust that maps the story of Earth from before its existence to the present day. It is a slow unfurling of deep time and planetary history that takes us, layer by layer, through the origins of everything, and the extinction of so much that is left in our wake.
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“Requiem – is it an artwork? A museum relic? Or perhaps a cabinet of curiosities, something that will pose an extreme riddle for future archaeologists? We owe our lives to civilisations come and gone, to the plethora of living beings that have led the way to our existence. Yet here we are, at a moment in time when the extinction induced by humans is unparalleled. Requiem presents a creative response to the destruction of life and nature that is all around us in the 22nd century. It is an elegy to a disappearing world. A lament.” - Katie Paterson
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Evergreen
Another new work, Evergreen, explicitly addressed a more specific extinction – that of flowers and plants that no longer exist, the images collated from across the centuries and redrawn as botanical illustrations woven together in the fine threads of an Arts & Crafts style embroidery.
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Detail of Evergreen, 2022
“Plants set the foundation for nearly all life on earth yet the number of plants that have disappeared from the wild is more than twice the number of extinct birds, mammals and amphibians combined. We share a quarter of our DNA with plants, they are our life source. Evergreen represents a reverence for nature.” - KP
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Endling
Endling is schematic circular painting which gathers the history of our planet in 100 pigments, ground from the pre-solar dust of 5 billion years ago to the ginkgo trees of Hibakujoumoku. The earliest life on Earth begins at ‘12 o’clock’ moving through all eras, and all the major extinctions, to the present day.
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Katie Paterson
Endling, 2021
mixed media in 100 pigments ground from the pre-solar dust of 5 billion years ago to the ginkgo trees of Hibakujumoku
series of 10 with 2 APs. This is #1.
92 x 92 cm
36 1/4 x 36 1/4 in
(paper)
97 x 97 x 5.7 cm
38 1/4 x 38 1/4 x 2 1/4 in
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Katie Paterson, To Burn, Forest, Fire, 2021
Commissioned by IHME Helsinki, 2021. Photo: Veikko Somerpuro
To Burn, Forest, Fire
To Burn, Forest, Fire is an ephemeral, experiential work that uses scent to explore ideas of the first and last forests on earth. Each is represented by a stick of incense – the first mimics what scientists have defined as the likely characteristics of the earliest earthly forest (of extinct Cladoxylopsida trees): the Cairo forest in the Hudson Valley, USA, and the last represented by the life filled smell of the highly threatened Amazon in the age of climate change.
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The Moment
The Moment is a timepiece in the shape of a hand-blown (quarter) hourglass, filled with star dust – the fossilised remnants of a time before the Earth and before the Sun reminding us, always and in the moment, of the preciousness of time.
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Installation of The Moment, Durham Cathedral, Durham, 2022
Requiem is a commission by Ingleby Gallery and the National Glass Centre as part of the Glass Exchange project, and the work will be on view at the National Glass Centre, Sunderland, from 17 June – 11 September 2022. It will be accompanied by a publication which includes essays by David Farrier and Jay Griffiths alongside insightful, explanatory texts by Jan Zalasiewicz, Emeritus Professor of Paleobiology, at the University of Leicester. We are very grateful to them all.
Glass Exchange is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, with additional funding from Art Fund, Henry Moore Foundation and the Coastal Communities Fund, and with thanks to the University of Sunderland and Durham Cathedral.
“I believe it is more important than ever to have an awareness of deep time, to situate ourselves in a wider time-horizon. The Moment is a quarter hourglass running for fifteen minutes, filled with fragments of pre-solar dust. It contains ancient dust from before the sun was born, it is billions of years old, and embedded in this dust are pre-solar grains, which predate the formation of our solar system. The artwork holds an entire cosmos, symbolically and physically.” - KP
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IDEAS
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Katie PatersonIDEAS - (An urn built to house the ashes of future earth), 2021Micro-waterjet-cut Sterling Silver
Edition of 3, this is 1/310.8 x 24 x 0.3 cm
4 1/4 x 9 1/2 x 1/8 inAn ongoing body of work, the ever-evolving Ideas series, lies at the heart of Paterson's practice: artworks that may or may not be realised in the physical realm but which, expressed in this distilled, haiku-like, poetic form, take shape as ‘idea-images’ in the mind. Each short text invites contemplation - perhaps an image of landscape, or the cosmos, or an expanded sense of earthly or geological time.
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Katie PatersonIDEAS - (The last sunset on earth slowed to eternity), 2021Micro-waterjet-cut Sterling Silver
Edition of 3, this is 1/311 x 22.9 x 0.3 cm
4 3/8 x 9 1/8 x 1/8 in -
Katie PatersonIDEAS - (A book that can be read only in moonlight), 2021Micro-waterjet-cut Sterling Silver
Edition of 3, this is 1/311.1 x 22 x 0.3 cm
4 3/8 x 8 5/8 x 1/8 in -
Katie PatersonIDEAS - (A pillow filled with fragments of deep space), 2021Micro-waterjet-cut Sterling Silver
Edition of 3, this is 1/311.1 x 26.2 x 0.3 cm
4 3/8 x 10 1/4 x 1/8 in
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KATIE PATERSON | TED WOMEN 2021
THE MIND-BENDING ART OF DEEP TIME -
Katie Paterson
Current viewing_room