- her website is very factual, describing each artwork in simple terms and with only a couple of images – this lets the viewer do the work
- a lot of use of space/the universe – situates us within this vast realm, expands art out beyond the usual realm of earth-based focus
- the use of starlight and vast distances over space play with deep time
- relational – bringing big cosmic events/lightning flashes (such as Streetlight Storm) down to a human scale, played out with human-scale, human-made objects
- the type of art that needs an explanation, unless maybe left down to title alone?
- Dying Star Letters – making the cosmic human/treating the cosmic as though it were human
- Langjökull, Snæfellsjökull, Solheimajökull – using a material as both subject and object
- glacier works also a comment on the climate crisis – link to work of Olafur Eliason’s Ice Watch
- Ideas – writing/an idea itself as art
- scientific/methodical way of working – particularly as seen in History of Darkness
- playing with multiple senses – Candle (from Earth Into a Black Hole)
- Future Library in particular plays with human time and a sense of the unknown that comes along with this – a provoking of the mind
- Campo del Cielo feels very relevant to my own work casting rocks – the idea of creating an identical replica, although Paterson takes this one step further through her use of the exact same material to make the replica – ideas of process, the (pointless?) intervention of the human in these cosmic processes/deep time
- her works are often ‘simple’ ideas that take huge logistical efforts to carry out (human-made logistical effort – oddly counter-intuitive when considering the vast scales her work considers)
- Fossil Necklace sums up this idea of taking deep-time events and scaling them perfectly down to an everyday human object
- almost ‘what-if’ scenarios of if we treated other planets how we treat our own (and potentially vice versa) – as demonstrated in Timepieces
- “In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth” Rachel Carson (in relation to First There is a Mountain)
- A place that exists only in moonlight – focuses on provoking the imagination and shows the importance of writing – an exercise to try myself?
- ^described as: ‘Comprising over one hundred short texts, each concerns the landscape, the universe, or an expanded sense of earthly and geological time. These poetic phrases take shape in the mind of whoever reads the words, and so become an expression of the idea itself.’
- “Katie Paterson’s Ideas are thought-bombs that explode silently, enacting the vast dramas of the universe in the imagination. Like much of the artist’s work they are shot through with awe and a sense of loss, alongside a fascination with deep time in all its forms. They encompass radical realignments of space, time and matter, in proposals that render the fleeting permanent.” James Attlee
- the importance of materiality/base elements – e.g. grinding down a stained glass window and returning to the desert reminds us we are all built from the same fundamental matter, the same atomic building blocks, elements forged in stars
- ideas of the sublime
- ‘understated in gesture yet monumental in scope’
First There Is a Mountain video:
- ‘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.’
- sand has come from mountains
- set of buckets and spades – mountains that scale inside one another – these will then be composted when the artwork has been finished (both mountains and buckets and spades returned to landscape – a new sense of ephemeral? ephemeral in deep time scales)
- remaking the process of the mountains being made and the erosion that comes after
- commissioned text for each location too
- ‘observed time flowing swift as gravity‘ – many mentions of hourglass connotations of sand
- ‘so kneel – and sink those tiny human hands, into the sand, which once was mountains tall, and make it shape a mountain once again’
A place that exists only in moonlight
- link to Turner’s work – all about experiencing the world, experiencing the elements
- melding art and science together – the enormous research involved, using experts – collaborative
- playful on a grand scale
Katie Paterson: a Trampoline for the Imagination, Louisiana Museum
- the moon, space, deep time
- the moon as an ancient beautiful being in the sky yet also seems new and fresh and pure – a reminder of the rest of the universe, a trampoline for the imagination into the rest of the universe
- ‘standardised moonlight’
- moonlight as intangible, ineffable – soft but bright, colours altered – many different experiences associated with it
- a physical effect on us – tides, our bodies
- it used to be part of the earth?
- also feels untouched
- a balanced of distant but close – a sense of it being ‘ours’
- using all senses – music, sound, Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata – absences become present
- the moon as a lonely place of dreams and wonder – can project onto it
Fossil Necklace
- genetics – looking deep within the human being, a ‘reverse telescope’
- learning about our past through our DNA, mapping deep time, a code for life, as the necklace is too
- found fossils, mapped them into a drawing, sent to an expert stone carver to many into tiny beads
- (difference between trace fossils and full bones/whole fossilised animals – also a whale’s ear bone, another link to ideas of different senses)
- huge history of geological time held within a tiny bead, like a cell containing DNA/a code for life
- also talking about where it’s exhibited – a quiet, intimate space
- how much the history of the earth is embodied in the material around us
- the necklace as a living fossil – reformed and made anew
- making connections between the macro and the micro
(also many other videos and essays on her website to look at)
Anna Harris 