Katie Paterson - a book which contains a series of artworks to exist in the imagination. Comprising over one hundred short texts, each concerns the landscape, the universe, or an expanded sense of earthly and geological time

Katie Paterson, A place that exists only in moonlight, Kerber Verlag, 2019.
http://katiepaterson.org/


"A place that exists only in moonlight" is a book which contains a series of artworks to exist in the imagination. 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.
The cover is printed with cosmic dust; a mixture of moondust, dust from Mars, shooting stars, ancient meteorites and asteroids.


“Paterson’s (*1981) Book of Ideas is a repository of daydreams. This compendium contains Ideas that might be realised or never concretised. At its best perhaps the goal should be to forever remain a beta-copy, always to be added to, to stay a book never finished.” - Mary Jane Jacob


“Katie Paterson is an astronomical artist – in the fullest sense of the word. The sky is not the limit for her. It is the beginning.”  – Kate Kellaway, the Observer


“Katie Paterson can take you out of your realm … she is so original, engaging and expansive. She makes us realise how inconsequential we are in relation to the universe.” – Cornelia Parker


Conceived by Paterson as an ‘exhibition of ideas’, this display will include the majority of Paterson’s existing works, which explore our relationship with the vastness and wonder of the universe; our desire to see the un-seeable, to know the un-knowable. The exhibition will also include several new commissions and 30 of Paterson’s Ideas – artworks designed to live in the imagination – interspersed with works by JMW Turner (1775-1851), one of the most celebrated artists in British history.
Over the last 10 years, Katie Paterson has developed an extraordinary and unique practice working with scientists and other experts to create works exploring the cosmos, geological time and the material world. She has worked with NASA to recreate the smell of Saturn’s moon, Titan (Candle (from earth into a black hole), 2015), and the European Space Agency to send a meteorite back into space (Campo del Cielo, Field of the Sky, 2012-1014). Of such collaborations she says, “I am asking people to access all they know.”
Like Paterson, Turner was fascinated by the sublime wonder of nature, capturing the changing and atmospheric qualities of light, air and weather in his paintings, while also being deeply curious about science and the physical world. Paterson has selected a group of over 20 watercolours from Tate’s collection making connections with her own works and Ideas.

“It has been a great privilege to explore the preoccupation with colour, light, space and time that Turner and I share. In this exhibition, mountains of disappearing sand, exploding stars and constellations will connect with Turner’s renderings of moonlit rivers, erupting volcanoes and otherworldly sunsets. The landscape and light of Margate will merge with the artworks themselves.” – Katie Paterson.
For this exhibition, Turner Contemporary is commissioning Paterson to make a new work, which will encompass the colour of the universe from its very beginning to its eventual end. Working with scientists who have pioneered research on the cosmic spectrum, Paterson will create a spinning wheel which charts the colour of the universe through each era of its existence.
Earlier this year, Turner Contemporary worked with members of the local community, The Conversation Agency and Paterson to explore the artist’s lifelong series of Ideas. These are artworks designed to live in the imagination, which take the form of short haiku-like sentences realised in silver. Using the gallery’s practise of ‘Philosophical Inquiry’ the artist’sIdeas were subject to intense discussion and scrutiny, resulting in the selection of three new Ideas to be made especially for this exhibition.
Paterson's new book, A place that exists only in moonlight, which features over one hundred of Paterson’s Ideas, will be published to coincide with the exhibition.  The book itself will be printed with cosmic dust.
Paterson is currently working on her most ambitious project to date. Future Library, 2014 – 2114, has seen her plant 1000 trees in a forest near Oslo which will supply the paper for an anthology of 100 books. A new text will be written each year by a new author, kept in trust and not read by anyone until 2114, when the library is complete. The authors include Margaret Atwood, Elif Shafak and Han Kang.
In spring 2019, Paterson will launch First There is a Mountain, a set of 'buckets and spades' in the form of world mountains, from which the public will build mountains of sand across the UK coastline. Turner Contemporary is one of 25 venues to host the event. - www.artfixdaily.com/artwire/release/9370-turner-contemporary-will-pair-scottish-artist-katie-paterson-with






'I've breathed in some crazy things from outer space' – Katie Paterson's cosmic art
The confetti cannon is set to go off every two weeks, firing out 3,216 pieces of paper, each colour-coded to match the gamma ray bursts that destroy entire galaxies. Nearby, a spinning wheel contains all the colours of the universe – today’s is “cosmic latte”. Elsewhere in Katie Paterson’s new show, there’s a lightbulb that emits “moonlight”, an LP that turns at the speed of the Earth (one rotation a day), and letters of condolence sent to an astronomer mourning for dead stars.
Critics have marvelled at Paterson’s ability to blend “the galactic and the mundane”. They have also coined a term for the feeling you get when contemplating her work: ontological vertigo. “I love that expression,” laughs the artist, who is busy installing what will be her largest ever British exhibition, at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. “That’s what I get if I’m thinking about billions of years. It is sometimes dizzy-making, especially if you’ve got that colour wheel spinning.”
Paterson grew up in Glasgow, moved to Berlin for a decade and now lives in Fife with her artist partner and young son. She first gained attention for an installation in which people could call on a phone to listen – live – to a glacier melting. Since that MA piece, she has created many impossible-sounding artworks: sending a meteorite back into space, recreating the smell of Saturn’s moon, compiling a picture archive of darkness throughout the universe, and mapping all known dead stars.
She was “a total daydreamer” growing up: “I would lock myself in rooms and spend time just daydreaming, which sounds completely nuts. I would construct worlds.” Paterson, who has dyslexia, develops ideas by writing words on pieces of paper and rearranging them to create short texts.
In between her two art degrees, she worked as a hotel maid in northern Iceland for seven months. “That’s had the biggest impact,” she says. “That was my first true experience of landscape: northern lights, geysers, glaciers, midnight sun, and the energy, the bursting Earth, just seeing the strata – time physically embodied in the landscape. The light was phenomenal. That’s when I started getting into sciences.”- Patrick Barkham
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The Cosmic Spectrum (2019)
The Cosmic Spectrum encompasses the colour of the universe throughout its existence, spinning in one continuous cycle. It charts a history of starlight, from the primordial era, through the Dark Ages and the appearance of the first stars, to the current Stelliferous Era and into the Far Future. It uses the 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey and speculative data from leading scientists to establish the average colour of each era. The 2dF Redshift Survey measures the light from a large volume of the universe, more than 200,000 galaxies. Scientists Karl Glazebrook and Ivan Baldry analysis this data in order to determine the average colour of the universe today as it would be perceived by the human eye – a colour they coined ‘Cosmic Latte’.




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