Archive 2014-15
Katie Patterson
- Venue: Fine Art Lecture Theatre
- Start: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 12:00:00 GMT
- End: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 13:00:00 GMT
Biography Katie Paterson, Born 1981 Glasgow, lives and works in Berlin Collaborating with leading scientists and researchers across the world, Katie Paterson’s 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, her work collapses the distance between the viewer and the most distant edges of time and the cosmos.
In the past, Paterson has broadcast the sounds of a melting glacier live to a visitor on a mobile phone in an art gallery, mapped all the dead stars, compiled a slide archive of the history of darkness across the ages, custom-made a light bulb to simulate the experience of moonlight, and buried a nano-sized grain of sand deep within the Sahara desert. Eliciting feelings of humility, wonder and melancholy akin to the experience of the Romantic sublime, Paterson's work is at once understated in gesture and yet monumental in scope. The development and production of her work involves close collaboration with specialists in different technologies, whether astronomers, electrical engineers or amateur radio enthusiasts known as 'moon-bouncers'.