Katie Paterson wants you to use your imagination when you approach her work. Not because she paints complex shapes to be deciphered like a Rorschach test, or because she sculpts her inspirations into a complex physical object, but because her work exists entirely as concepts to provoke thought and ideas. ‘The imagination is really important in a lot of my work, and where the mind takes you’, she says from her studio in Berlin. 

Her catalyst for creative thought when we meet  her is a project called Second Moon, an attempt to imitate the moon’s natural orbit by couriering a chunk of lunar rock, verified as legit by meteorite experts, around the world over the course of a year. ‘I was imagining all the mass of things that are in the air above us at any one time – people, objects – just everything in manmade orbit’, she explains. ‘I imagined creating some kind of orbit myself, so my first thought was to make another moon, a second moon. It’s just a tiny piece but it still seems wonderful’. Paterson allows her audience to track this manmade moon on its journey from London to China, China to Australia, where it is to be displayed as part of the Adelaide Festival, then onto LA and London before it reaches its final destination at Patterson’s first solo show, Ideas, at Edinburgh’s Ingleby gallery from the 27th June, using a specially developed iPhone app. 

When the moon ‘touches down’ in the Scottish capital, where it will remain until the end of September, it will sit alongside the sum of her other musings, which have taken her from Icelandic glaciers to tips of Hawaiian volcanoes, as well as looking to the edge of the universe with super-powered telescopes, although when we spoke to her, she’d not yet decided how her moon’s orbit will be transferred into a tangible form. ‘I’ve been collecting all the UPS documentation from the different places it’s been and when it’s been stuck in customs and quarantine’, she considers. ‘Perhaps that could become part of the main part of the piece at the end’. 

At the time of writing, the app informs me that the second moon is right here in London, while the actual moon is lending its light to the glistening Caribbean sea. ‘The app is a way people can connect with my work very easily and simply’, she says. ‘Because a lot of my work is unseen and in the imagination, it needs something to pull it back to earth, and I’m usually using technology of some form to connect with different places’. 

Despite growing up in the urban sprawl of Glasgow, Paterson enthuses that ‘nature, landscape, geology and geography are all things that come into my work’. Her stint living in the wilds of Iceland following university, as well as spending ‘summers camping in quite desolate places’, growing up, go some way to explaining this. Of Iceland, which Paterson suspects did have a ‘major impact’ on the work she would come to produce, she dreamily recalls the ‘raw landscape where you can watch the sun touch the edge of the earth’. She continues, ‘everything in nature is just so prevalent there. You’re breathing the purest air and you can almost see where the lava has melted and then hardened to show layers of time’.  

Patterson came up with a novel way of allowing people to feel as immersed in this wild landscape as she did. ‘I made some records out of ice that played the sounds of the glaciers’, she says. ‘I remember standing and looking at the lines of the rocks and I imagined a needle of a record just playing the landscape, so I collected up some water in Iceland, and took it back to London and started messing around with it’. The result was three ice records, each made from the refrozen melt water of a different glacier, which she then played simultaneously, recording the unique sound of the needles scratching through the ice, and the water as the records began to melt. Played until they returned to liquid form, each one only got single go on the turntable, but the recording of this two hour transformation remains. Abstract as it might sound, Paterson’s creation is genuinely mesmerising, and between the stark, staccato jumping of the needle, and rapid gushing of water that you hear, she certainly goes a good way to evoking the flavour of Iceland’s erratic scenery (listen to them here).  

Patterson’s latest project, Future Library, is no less entwined with nature, and taking place over the course of 100 years, also draws on a fascination with time that stems from gazing into the depths of space, and runs through her portfolio. ‘A lot of my work deals with time, whether it’s durational, in that it lasts a couple of years or something, or is looking at the furthest away darkness of the universe, three and a half billion years away’. She says, ‘The work evolves too’, Paterson continues, an idea that is key to the century-long duration of Future Library, for which a thousand trees have been planted in Nordmarka, just outside Oslo, and will be used to supply paper for a special anthology of books printed in 2114.

One writer every year will contribute a text to be held in a special room at the at Oslo’s New Public Deichmanske Library, ready for publication. As part of the Future Library trust, Paterson will guide the selection of contributors, the first of which will be announced in September. ‘Future Library challenges our preconceptions about where and when public art takes place’, she explains. ‘This work compels us to think about what we might tell a future reader about our time’. 

The projects Paterson already has mapped out might span the rest of her future, but she’s plenty more plans in the pipeline. ‘I’d like to go to Alaska, I love extreme landscapes’, she says. As with Second Moon, she’s increasingly drawn beyond the boundaries of our own planet too. ‘I’m interested in matter and phenomenon in general’, she says. ‘I just think it’s incredible that people can now look to the edges of the universe and almost to the big bang and the beginning of everything’. Whatever she might have in store next then, even the sky, it seems, is not the limit for this artist. 

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