Katie Paterson has mapped all the dead stars, broadcast the sounds of a melting glacier, created a candle that smells like space and designed a glass sculpture using sand from every desert on Earth. Her work is designed to be experienced, inviting audiences to open their minds to the vast wonders of the universe. While her conceptual artwork does not necessarily lend itself to being hung in a gallery, she has exhibited at many prominent galleries around the world, including the Hayward Gallery, Tate Britain, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Guggenheim Museum New York and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

This interview first appeared in Issue 05 of The Beautiful Truth. Get your copy here.

TBT: Your work deals with topics of space, the natural world and deep time. Did you always have an interest in these larger phenomena?

KP: I wasn’t a child who grew up immersed in the sciences. But during my studies, I travelled to Iceland, which became a starting point for a lot of my art. It was my first genuine experience of an immense, wild and almost untouched landscape. The light is just extraordinary, and I remember being completely surrounded by all this elemental nature.

By reading the landscape and looking at and holding fossils and various materials, I started to connect to these immense time frames. I found it incredibly inspiring and grounding to see and touch things far beyond our human lives. Something clicked there: I knew I wanted to explore the connection between us and the wider natural world, and break down the boundaries that separate the two.

My artwork also delves beyond ourselves and our lifetimes. It spans the Earth and the cosmos. I try to collapse the distance and bring into more intimate space what seems so unbelievably immense, vast and daunting.

TBT: Where do you get inspiration from?

KP: I have a seven-year-old, and I love how children condense things, especially science, into manageable phrases that are still really profound. But as we grow older, we tend to develop habits and ways of thinking that are more rational or linear.

All my ideas start with a tiny idea – just a few words scribbled down. Often, I approach my art with a clear idea but not really knowing where it will lead. For example, with All The Dead Stars, I remember first trying to uncover what exactly a dead star is. How can we categorise them – supernovae, black holes, gamma-ray bursts? Which eventually led me to think: “I want to make a map of all of them.” Bit by bit the project unravelled, I approached different scientists, and over time we created a map documenting the locations of 27,000 dead stars – all that have been recorded and observed by humankind.

TBT: What did you learn about the cosmos from this artwork? What message were you trying to convey?

KP: I learned about the recycling system of the universe that’s been going on for billions of years. When a star explodes and dies, its remnants make up literally our blood, our breath, our planet. Everything on Earth comes from this vast cosmic recycling system. The death of a star leads to so much life.

Making that map was my first real encounter with trying to reconcile or gain a wider awareness of where our planet came from and how interconnected everything is – all the incredible connections that we have. If this hadn’t happened at this particular time in the universe, none of us would be here. I love that we’re all literally born from the remnants of stars.

TBT: Your conceptual artwork not only deals with the ephemeral but can be ephemeral in itself.

KP: Some of my artwork is entirely gone, or it may last only for the duration of the artwork, such as a Candle (from Earth Into a Black Hole) which smells of space. Once it burns, that’s it. I think a lot of my artwork is experiential – things you can see or smell or experience – but it’s very much about connections and feelings.

For example, with the candles, I can’t remember how many we made, but they were so bespoke and really complex to make. I knew from the outset that they would be burned and gone, yet I found myself burning them avidly during exhibitions – “Let’s burn one a day!” Then suddenly, we had nothing left, and the candle maker couldn’t make any more.

I see this as a personal learning curve: embracing the transient nature of these pieces. The same goes for the Light Bulb to Simulate Moonlight, which has a time frame of an average human lifespan built into it; eventually, it will also be gone. Then there’s Future Library, which spans a hundred years and will continue after I’m gone. I genuinely embrace the idea of creating works that won’t necessarily exist again.

TBT: Such a beautiful, and counter-intuitive, way to create. Tell us more about the Future Library.

KP: Future Library is a 100-year, literally growing, organic artwork designed to outlive us and come to fruition in a century. It is made up of a few different parts, one of which is a forest we planted, comprising around a thousand Norwegian spruce trees. In 2114, we will cut down these trees and turn them into a book, written by authors now, but who will never see their work published until the trees are fully grown.

It includes stories, poems or novels, forming an anthology of a hundred works on paper made from these trees. Each year, we invite an author to write whatever they choose. The author visits the forest for a handover ceremony where they present their manuscript. We then walk together into the forest, where they hand over their work, and then it’s locked away in a room called the Silent Room at the Deichman Library in Oslo.

This room was built from the wood we salvaged when we cleared the forest to plant new saplings. The Silent Room is small, quite cosy and intimate, and made from around 40,000 pieces of wood. Each layer has a drawer to lock the manuscripts away. It’s quite exciting for the authors to place their manuscripts in the drawers, knowing they will remain locked for 100 years.

TBT: What are people’s reactions to the concept of deep time?

KP: Some say deep time makes them feel insignificant in the face of its vastness, but for me, it gives us more significance. The huge trajectory of the universe and all the species that lived and died before us, and here we are – isn’t that extraordinary?

I find it intriguing that grasping 100 years can be more challenging than conceptualising a million. It doesn’t seem like that long, yet it feels intimidating because it stretches just beyond our horizon of understanding. And when we look back on the changes of the past 100 years, imagining the next 100 years becomes nearly unthinkable.

TBT: How do you connect your work to current crises?

KP: One of my first artworks was Vatnajökull (the sound of), a live phone line to an Icelandic glacier. I remember when I first visited a glacier I didn’t quite know how to connect to those time frames. The artwork therefore became about how to feel, experience and connect with these complex phenomena.

But as the years have passed and the climate emergency has deepened, I can’t help but relate my artworks to that. How do we grapple with the notion of deep time amid the human-induced climate crisis? I think my work inevitably relates to those issues, though it’s not always my starting point.

TBT: Tell us about your work with Apple.

KP: I worked with Apple to create a glass sculpture adjacent to their Visitor’s Center in California. We partnered with UNESCO’s GeoParks to gather sand from every desert in the world, 70 in total, and we turned that sand into the glass.
 
We weren’t sure what colours would emerge as it ended up being a mixture of sand from volcanic deserts, ocean deserts, polar deserts, but the varying iron content in the sand led to some amazing colours. At first we thought it would be a range of greens, but then suddenly we got all these blues which were coming from the volcanic sand because of its higher iron content.

The installation comprises nearly 500 cast glass columns arranged in a wave-like shape, allowing people to walk through. We organised it into a gradient of colours transitioning from greens to blues, and has bubbles, textures, and unusual shifts in perspective. The glass bends light and reflection, so it becomes quite mirage-like, almost like water. 

TBT: Your work is so inspiring, and it definitely causes people to think outside themselves and consider the bigger picture. What advice would you give to people who are looking for more opportunities for this deeper way of thinking?

KP: One thing that I definitely do is spend time in nature. It’s literally the simplest way to connect. Nature is all around us, but it helps if I go somewhere where I can really face the water or the sky. When I switch off and remove all distractions, it can be so calming and grounding. Suddenly, my mind unlocks, and I can start thinking in ways that often aren’t there in the rapid, fast-paced working environment we’re often in at the studio.

It’s so important to tune into our local surroundings, to feel the seasons change and to notice the changing light throughout the day. I always try to be in sync a little more with the day and night, and that practice definitely helps me. It opens my mind to the kind of ideas that can emerge from that.