To build a better future, we must first imagine one. This International Women’s Day, we honour five female artists we’ve collaborated with over the years, each holding past and future in creative tension. Across photography, illustration, conceptual art and immersive design, they explore memory and mortality, transience and legacy, imagination and care. Together, their work invites us to see the world not only as it is, but as it could be. 

Katie Paterson

What does it mean to make art for a time you’ll never see?

Katie Paterson has mapped dead stars, broadcast a melting glacier, and created a glass sculpture using sand from every desert on Earth. Her work stretches across cosmic and geological time, asking us to reconsider scale, permanence and wonder. 

In Future Library, she planted a forest in Norway whose trees will become books unread until 2114. Other works, like Candle (from Earth Into a Black Hole), exist only as long as they burn. Many of her pieces embrace disappearance. “I genuinely embrace the idea of creating works that won’t necessarily exist again,” she said in her 2024 interview with us. 

Read her interview here, first published in Issue 05 of The Beautiful Truth magazine.

Olivia Guigue

On the shores of the Thames, random fragments of our digital lives surface in the mud – washed up by the tide and half-buried in silt. 

In Museum for a Future, French visual artist and photographer Olivia Guigue collects these discarded objects – cables, shards of mobile phones, plastic casings, circuit boards – and photographs them as if they were archaeological finds. Once everyday tools, they become relics of the 20th and 21st centuries. 

“The collection is a bit like a memento mori,” she told us. In an age of planned obsolescence, her work invites us to consider what we leave behind – and what future generations might infer from the debris of our devices.

Read her interview here, first published in Issue 01 of The Beautiful Truth magazine.

Dornith Doherty

For over a decade, Dornith Doherty has been documenting a quiet act of collective foresight: the preservation of seeds. 

Her project Archiving Eden takes viewers inside the world’s seed banks, including the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic. Using X-ray and large-format photography, she presents seeds as luminous vessels of possibility – tiny forms that carry entire ecosystems within them. 

Her images reveal preservation not as fear, but as care: a commitment to life beyond our own. 

Her artwork appeared in Issue 02 of The Beautiful Truth magazine.

Claudia Biçen

An illustrator, facilitator and experience designer, Claudia Biçen uses creativity to help people deepen their relationships – with themselves, with each other, and with the more-than-human world. 

Her recent book, The Forgotten Teachers, written by neuroscientist and poet Brian Isett and illustrated by Biçen, blends research with mythic imagination. It reclaims storytelling as a way of remembering the wisdom embedded in nature – and our responsibility to it. She also brings her creativity to TBT as Head of Experiences.  

Read Claudia’s writing here, and an edited excerpt from the book in Issue 06 of The Beautiful Truth magazine.

Dorien Brouwers

A ringing phone. A bee in flight. A quiet room filled with colour.
 
Award-winning illustrator and picture-book author Dorien Brouwers captures small, everyday moments and renders them luminous. Her hazy lines and bold palettes create scenes that feel both intimate and expansive. 

Within the ordinary, she sketches something hopeful – a future that feels gentle, possible, and worth imagining. 

Her artwork appears in Issue 05 of The Beautiful Truth magazine, in the article From What Is to What If.