KATIE PATERSON

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. ’